


creation

by cloudycats



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Gen, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, giratina as an elder god, hunter is small and squishy and precious, hunter wishes hunter was less small and squishy and precious, which basically just means it Does Not Get kids these days
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-02-14 04:30:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 37,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12999909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudycats/pseuds/cloudycats
Summary: Giratina sneakily sort-of adopts some little god thing.(heavily inspired byFulgadrum's Bloodborne/Dishonored crossover,Moon and Tide)





	1. Giratina

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Moon and Tide](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9197195) by [Fulgadrum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fulgadrum/pseuds/Fulgadrum). 



To those few who know of its existence, the distorted, fractured domain of Giratina is the Reverse World. It represents possibility, the good and the bad and the neutral: all that the true world it reflects could be if physical laws held less sway, if the day-to-day living of pokémon and humans impacted the planet to their full extent. When a magcargo's skin heats to a temperature that should boil the air for dozens of meters, it's the Reverse World that shepherds away the brunt of the devastation. When a human captures Celebi and makes an incoherent eddy of time, it's the Reverse World that calms the ripples.

One wouldn't be wrong in believing that. But if the Reverse World was nothing more than a crutch for the true world to break its stumbles on, Giratina could never stand on equal footing with its siblings, the dragons of space and time. As just another dimension that borders the one that hosts the largest concentration of pokémon life, Palkia might as well claim dominion over it and render Giratina redundant.

The first incorrect belief, and the one from which all other errors stem, comes across in its names: those who've discovered it assume that the Reverse World is the plane on the wrong side of the mirror.

The Reverse World is the _origin_. From it came space and time and matter and spirit, and so the rest of the universe unfolded in fractals around it. And when the last star fades from the sky, heat and light and gas misting to black, it will be to the Reverse World that the universe returns.

Until that moment comes, Giratina prolongs the inevitable. Aerodactyl live and die, Regigigas pulls continents apart as easily as a graveler makes a nest from boulders, humans realize increasingly creative ways to keep their settlements intact on a planet where common rodents can call down lightning from the heavens. Giratina steadies a faultline shaken by two onix's passage, repairs the soil trampled and salted in an army's wake, corrects the gravity disrupted in the aftermath of an argument between powerful psychics. With some exceptions, life is a transient thing; the dragon keeps track of its passage only through its patterns.

Some exceptions referring, in this case, to the small creature falling through the air. It's not unusual. Dimensions have their own sort of gravity, and when they move – as they do – they overlap at points. Things come through.

It's a process easily reversed. There are always portals opening and closing between the Distortion World and its reflections. Giratina used to leave the creatures who come through by accident to their own devices, but that was before it discovered that a fall – not the impact, because that's always harmless, but the fall itself – can kill.

It only happens rarely, but there's no clear connection Giratina's found between those who die that way that will let it predict when it will happen. The dragon's simply taken to treating it as a possibility every time.

The unfortunate soul is a fair ways off, a speck of motion against nebulous darkness, but distance is malleable. Giratina curves beneath a brook coursing unsupported between two drifting islands, through the rose window of a cavernous building that in the bordering world is a chapel dedicated to the three lake sprites, and when it comes out the other side of the roof the creature is falling directly above it.

It's an enterprising thing. As it passes an island, a bulky, segmented blade that extends with the creature's swing scores a gash into the rock. The blade slips free quickly, but before the creature's plummet picks up speed again Giratina snatches it out of the air.

It panics as soon as the dragon's mandibles close around it. Understandable, but irritating; when, in its flailing, the blade scrapes painfully across the crown protecting Giratina's eyes, the dragon drops it without remorse. Giratina swings around, phases through the blade and the scattering of hypersonic projectiles the little creature sends its way, and catches it again from behind, this time maneuvering to pin its arms in.

Giratina retraces its visitor's path, searching for the traces of the portal it came through. Usually the dragon would simply leave it on the nearest solid surface, but this one fell far enough that it likely won't be able to get back to its entry point on its own. Returning to their own worlds near where they left seems to make the experience less disorientating for them.

As they climb, the creature tries to wriggle out of Giratina's hold. The dragon tightens its grip, carefully so as not to fracture any fragile bones, and the creature finally goes limp. Giratina glances at it, not worried, but... well, a little concerned. It doesn't know why things sometimes die in the air, after all. The view's difficult enough at this angle and distance that it can't make out details; the blade and the projectile launcher haven't slipped from the creature's hands, though, so the lack of movement seems to be voluntary.

As they pass through a cloudy fold of space, gravity spins neatly on its axis. The creature startles, and the dragon, reassured, turns its attention away. Its passage disperses the thin haze to reveal clear, fathomless water stretching for miles across below. In other worlds, this is where sea meets sky. The creature can't be from past this place, yet Giratina came across no portals on the way. The dragon slows to a stop near the surface and looks over the scene reflected below, the floating islands and the clouds and the crystal shards that are windows to other planes, searching for what it may have missed.

An arm squeezes free of Giratina's hold. The creature reaches out. Faint ripples spread where the tips of its fingers brush the sea. They pass over the reflection of Giratina, over an eye.

The red iris bright as coals waxes large and luminous under the waves, and the thing looking back from the water isn't Giratina at all.

The dragon recoils, jerking the hand away; the instant snaps. The reflection shatters against its scream, a call that's query and threat and declaration of self.

There's no reply. As soon as the sound fades, the sea rushes in to fill the hollow. Giratina looks down at itself, at the creature with its free hand curled into a claw against the dragon's mandible. Giratina's spooked it. Its ribs are expanding and contracting visibly with its breaths.

The dragon flips around, leaving the water behind. It weaves through the branches of a great stone tree; coming out the other side, the sea is gone, and the rising sun tints every cloud a lighter purple and casts a faint glitter over a maze of frosted isles. Giratina lets go over the base of a cliff, and its visitor lands on its feet in a patch of snow that nearly reaches its knees, stumbles a step for balance, and then trips with a crunch of breaking ice.

Giratina hovers while it unsteadily picks itself up. In retrospect, this might not be an ideal climate to have placed it in. It doesn't have any flames or ice or thick fur on its body, some of the common physical traits of fire types and ice types. Still, it likely wouldn't appreciate being relocated again.

It looks up at Giratina. Or turns the dragon's way, in any case – it doesn't have eyes that Giratina can see, just ragged strips of cloth tied around the upper half of its face beneath the head covering. Odd little thing. Where did it come from?

Unfortunately, no matter what form of creature it is, Giratina wouldn't understand it even if it gave a speech elaborating on its origins. There are so many human languages, and they all change so quickly, that it's long since stopped putting in the effort to learn any, and there's a psychic component to pokémon speech that Giratina predates the evolution of.

The creature turns away and takes a few steps to put it out from under Giratina's shadow. There's an odd lurch to its gait unlike in any other bipedal stride Giratina's seen. It doesn't take much deduction to discover why: the footprints it leaves in the snow don't match each other. The left is a sort of oval squished inwards at the middle while the right doesn't seem to have a foot at all, only a thin leg that tapers towards the bottom.

Slowly, it carves a short, straight furrow through the snow with its projectile launcher. Once done, it cocks its head at Giratina for a moment; then, methodically, it clears another line at a slant through the first. Giratina leans over as it makes a third, a fourth.

A fifth line, but even as it begins, before it meets the others, Giratina loses interest. Whatever quality about them roused its curiosity is gone. The creature pauses, then kicks the snow back into shape over it. It starts over from another angle, bringing the line in to meet the others at a different point. Giratina's attention is caught again. A sixth....

In a shift of thought, the dragon understands what it's looking at.

Query and threat and declaration of self. The echo of its own call written in lines in the snow: _creation_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as noted, would not exist if not for [Fulgadrum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fulgadrum/pseuds/Fulgadrum)'s really most excellent Bloodborne/Dishonored crossover, [Moon and Tide](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9197195/chapters/20865674). it'll hopefully go in a different direction, though. maybe? i don't really have any of this planned out. at all.
> 
> the hunter is definitely the player character, not Gehrman.
> 
> is this Pokémon gameverse, animeverse, mangaverse: some arbitrary cross between game and anime, plus a boatload of headcanon for good measure.
> 
> which Bloodborne ending: Honoring Wishes. (the one where you only fight a single final boss after the wet nurse.)


	2. Giratina

The creature's vocabulary is limited to other beings' words, which raises questions all its own. Giratina makes no move to interrupt, though, as piece by piece, echo by echo, the creature gives as clear an overview as it can of a town by the sea. It explains about the way a species descended from humans fell to conflict after the discovery of a blood that can cure any illness, about the nightly hunts of mortal-borne monsters, about the watcher in the moon who sponsors the hunts.

Aside from a single offhand reference to being human that Giratina attributes to an error resulting from its method of speech, it skirts over mentioning itself. For a human to know these things, to be able to speak even in such a constrained form about them, isn't conceivable. There are days Arceus can't understand its firstborn three, because in learning to socialize with humans and the younger pokémon it must by necessity abandon vast swathes of its own experience; there are aspects of the universe so alien to the current generations that merely possessing knowledge of them makes for an insurmountable communication barrier.

After the last stroke of its choppy description, it trudges back to the first rune and sets about erasing its work. It seems such a tragedy, in that moment, that it has no voice of its own, that it should understand as so few in all the universes do and yet still not know enough to speak. What would the creature's own voice look like? What would its first word be? A few more pushes to bring it to the edge, and perhaps...

It makes a quiet sound in the back of its throat. It writes of a graveyard filled with flowers, lit by the moon's grace and nourished by an oath made in a different lifetime. There is a promise. There is a purpose. There is a home that treasures it and welcomes its return, the creature its companion through the long nights.

...no pushes, then. Giratina dips its head closer to the snow as if a different angle will present some method to misinterpret that final word, but its meaning is quite clear. The clearest, in fact, nothing but deep lines and clean edges in the straight line and the slanted square it bisects.

It turns its eyes to the creature, who straightens under its focus. Giratina didn't notice earlier, but most of its weight has shifted onto its projectile launcher and left leg, the one with a foot, since it touched ground. Favoring an injury. Life tends towards symmetry in form; whatever the creature is or has the potential to be, it seems not to be exempt from that particular pattern after all.

Giratina cannot return it to its home world. For one, Giratina doesn't know how it could have arrived here in the first place if not through a portal; for two, the dragon can't place its world. It made no mention of pokémon in its descriptions, which sets it as too far from the origin for Giratina to reach without leaving the Distortion World untended for a dangerously long time. But the cosmic beings sound uncannily like pokémon from the generation that followed Giratina's, even though the dragon's certain it should know everyone from that age.

Palkia can locate and open a portal to the universe. With some difficulty, Arceus can likely do the same. Giratina, however, has not sought peaceable contact with either of them since the humans in the bordering world learned how to use pokémon's abilities to help cultivate their food plants, and it would greatly prefer not to ever change that fact.

If the creature wishes to return, it can only find a method on its own. It's fully capable of doing so. It already came close earlier when it contacted the watcher through the ocean. Until then, Giratina can at least find a better climate for it. And do something about that leg as well, since the injury plainly inconveniences it.

Giratina tells it as much and waits while it etches. It seems to require writing as a bridge to comprehension. Or perhaps it needs only time to understand, the writing nothing but a supplement, as partway through the word it rather suddenly (and disappointingly) breaks off, shifting into a pale mist that reforms well out of Giratina's immediate reach. Did Giratina scare it somehow?

But of course it has no way of telling the dragon should that be the case. Giratina asks regardless, and after a pause the creature lets its weapons hang at its sides, though it takes another step back. If it wants to put much more distance between them, it'll have to move to a neighboring isle.

It's so _small_. For some reason, Giratina's mind keeps catching on that fact. The dragon has no recent experience actually interacting with anything of this size. Or, no, its size isn't the issue. Necrozma, who Giratina's familiar with for the number of times it's had to clean up after the light-eating pokémon's rampages, isn't very much larger, but it has never held itself like it expected to be blown over should someone like Giratina pass by too close to it. The dragon's watched it throw itself into battle against pokémon of comparable size without hesitation. 

And now it watches the creature do just that as well.

The attack comes from so far out of left field that Giratina doesn't even think to phase and only even rears back purely out of reflex. The shallow cut it receives down its front is more bewildering than painful.

The next, from underneath, is the opposite. Giratina passes into shadow and materializes farther above the island, coiling around its wound. Blood sinks into the snow, into the white space that was so recently occupied by the creature's echoes. The creature itself is nowhere to be seen, but this world is Giratina's domain; it screams, long and high, and the gradients of the Reverse World's silence return an answer.

The creature's concealed itself perfunctorily under the overhang of the cliff, barely out of the dragon's line of sight. Giratina considers retaliating – it's only natural that it should take offense at such completely unprovoked aggression.

Eventually, it decides against it. It still has questions it's curious about, and no real harm was done. The scratches will heal.

It's a mystery why they were inflicted in the first place, but Giratina rather doubts the creature will answer if asked at this point. In any case, it plainly doesn't want the dragon near it; it does, however, still need to be relocated, since its wispy build should not in the least suit it for extended stays in colder climes. Simply snatching it up again now that Giratina knows it can speak seems rather crude, though.

Well, the dragon can hardly be blamed if it will not  _use_ its speech. Turning to violence before words is the sort of unflattering behavior it expects from its siblings and creator and no one else. (Although – thinking on the matter, its siblings, at least, share a commonality with the creature of knowing no widely-used languages. But if there's a pattern, Giratina breaks it, and Arceus continues to have no excuse.)

It vanishes, sinking into the shadow beneath the cliff; the creature leaps away just in time as Giratina surges up from under it. It slashes the dragon as it passes, then moves quickly back and away from the dark tendrils that lash out to grab it.

Giratina hovers out of its range again and glances at the latest injury. Small and fragile it may be, but evidently the creature does know how to fight. Rather competently, too, considering its performance against an opponent who outclasses it to such an extent. The gap between them likely doesn't even faze it too much; if its tactics are anything to go by, it's accustomed to battling as the significantly weaker party.

Giratina usually counters more agile opponents through wide-area attacks of overwhelming force. That's not particularly applicable here – the last thing it would want is to kill the creature – which leaves the question of how it's going to catch the little thing. Paralyzing it would slow it down enough, but Giratina, not being naturally inclined towards producing it, can only muster up so much electricity before it'll need to rest.

Earlier, Giratina grabbed it while it was falling. Whatever its maneuverability on the ground, it has no method of changing course in the air. Giratina considers the angle. It's come out from under the cliff, which will make things simpler.

The dragon phases and reappears at the base of the cliff, putting the creature's back to the edge of the island. Giratina merges the tendrils on its back into wings and brings them forward, threading its own essence into the draft as sustenance. The creature staggers beneath the wind before it pushes its blade into the snow to anchor itself, refusing with annoying tenacity to allow itself to be blown off the island.

Giratina takes the moment while it's off balance to hurtle forwards. The creature turns into fog. Giratina winds around, and as soon as the creature reforms swings its tail; the creature ducks, dematerializes again when the tail comes down and smashes a pit into the snow, and darts to the side when tendrils reach for it.

It moves in for an attack, and Giratina calls up a shield. The expanding bubble slams it back while Giratina twists to face it, sparks glowing between the dragon's spread mandibles. The creature rolls to its feet, then sprints _towards_ the wave of electricity, losing its form just as the attack reaches it.

Giratina thought the fog was similar to a vaporeon's ability to become water, but it must be closer to Giratina's own skill: rather than turning into a different state of matter, what it's doing is momentarily displacing itself from reality. The dragon tosses up another gust before the creature reaches it, then bends down to pick it up – except, of course, it phases again and hurries backward, giving itself some illusion of distance.

Sustained wide-area attack of overwhelming force. Giratina is sorely tempted.

The creature doesn't make another move. Experimentally, the dragon starts to form a shadow ball between its mandibles; the creature shifts its stance, but nothing else. Giratina lets the energy dissipate, and the creature visibly tenses.

After a long stillness, it starts gradually to settle. Giratina eyes it dubiously. _It_ attacked first; what justification does it have for wariness now?

It takes a single step closer, acting like it expects Giratina to send a hyper beam its way any instant. It looks – and Giratina actually blinks at the strangeness of the notion, but – it puts Giratina in mind of the way the dragon itself acts around its creator. During the rare interactions where they aren't trying to maim each other, in any case.

Though comparing itself to Arceus is....

Unceremoniously shoving that thought aside for the moment (and all foreseeable future moments), the new perspective does frame the attack in a rather different context. Something it did clearly set the creature off. The dragon said something that unwittingly agitated it, and the creature's grasp of speech is limited enough that it has no words available to it that could explain the cause of its distress.

So: violence, the universal language.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> item ticked off bucket list: write a fight scene where the combatants share a pronoun with each other and also everything else in the scene.


	3. The Moon Presence

The other staggers under the force of her leap, still shrieking soundlessly, a steady howling litany of _what have you done how could you they killed me they killed me killed me_. Her claws tear deep into the writhing, exposed veins of his back, into the pale lines of half-healed scars. Blood boils up and spurts from the wounds as he flails.

Far too much blood. She springs back – late, and the edge of the explosion catches her, tosses her down the side of the hill as she scrabbles for purchase amid the flowers and grave markers, her twisted bones rattling with the impact. Red droplets score gashes in her papery skin where they land.

She's moved well past the utter, disbelieving shock of his breaking a taboo so intrinsic that its existence has never been considered. She trembles with rage and hate, and he shudders with pain and grief and blind fury, and their blood soaks into the fertile soil of her dream, painting the flowers a mirror of the scarlet moon that belongs only in the great hunt outside. How _dare_ he drag his animus into this place. At the base of the spreading tree at the top of the hill, her second child's headstone is strewn dust and pebbles. Her third, who fought beside her and is the reason the other's largest eyes are crushed mush dripping in globules from his face, was knocked over the fence and, at the end of the fall, transported elsewhere instead of returning as should have happened. The dream holds, indicating its host's state remains unchanged, but whatever the condition, her child has been stolen and hidden from her. Not kin (for she will never again have kin), but a child of hers nonetheless. She will not lose another one this way. She will not.

The other rushes towards her on myriad limbs, cosmic power gathering about him in his charge; she jumps just before the collision. For the briefest of moments, her shrunken wings seem to catch the still air, but then she's atop him and the feeling passes. Though arcane energy sears her feet, she pushes through the pain and wraps her tails around his skull, probing for the gaps her child opened.

He skids to a stop, the light around him sputtering as he smashes his head into the ground. She roars. As soon as he straightens, she retracts her bruised tails, wrenching them free from their grip. Ocular fluid sprays across the grass, and he screams. The scent of rot tangles itself into the lumenflowers. _Beast_ , she hisses. They're all monsters, these ilk of hers, but he's not even worth that anymore. He should be eyeless, the outward appearance to fit the mind. To confront her directly, to invade her dream – wrong, wrong, disgusting and _wrong_.

 _Nightmare,_ he accuses, as if that's a horrific thing to be, as if that can ever be worse than what he's done, _they killed me, you would help they who killed me._

She leaps off of him. Some of the tension loosens from her frame when the flowers soothe her burned feet. She retreats a step, and her head tilts. Beneath this hill lie the remnants of the beast hunters her children have guided; when she reaches, they respond, blood that carries the echoes of their final dreaming moments trickling up to pool around her.

Nightmare indeed. Does he not realize he has no leg to stand on? Where is his self-awareness? He's barely sapient anymore, nothing but a putrid body of directionless violence. Her children have always had the right of it: mad things are to be put down. The cosmos will be purer without his taint. She looks at him, gaze meeting the oozing holes in his face, and beyond, to the darkness that hides the eyes inside. She says, _Die._

Strength leaks from his body. He collapses in a pile of bleeding flesh; the unbroken ranting subsides to a wounded gurgle. While he struggles to regain himself, the blood around her rises, balling into globes like dark stars, until another command breaks their coherency and sends them scattering outwards.

The other tries to shake off the blood that sprays across him and steams against his body. She hurtles forwards, slams into his head with force enough to tip him over and send him to the ground. Her hair slithers into the crevices, seeking out the paths her tails gouged, while her claws scrape over his skull and catch in his swollen neck.

He melts under her, flesh turning spongy and bone softening, and she strengthens her efforts; then she loses her grip. Her feet slide, and she scrambles to keep her place but he's dissolving into the mist of another dream, escaping after all the damage he's caused. She rears and comes down heavily with claws and tentacles and rock-hard skull.

She crushes only flowers. For a moment, she stands still, surrounded by a thinning cloud of silver fog. Then even that fades, and she's alone on the hill. Blood and craters and shattered graves, and her child lost.

Her bones quiver, chiming like bells where they touch.

Her child's loss is not directly the other's fault. She doubts enough of him remains to plan such an elaborate kidnapping, and in any case, the one who actually sent her child over the side of the dream was her. They lost track of each other's positions, neither of them being used to combat alongside an ally, and by the time she realized what the odd weight she ran into was – well. But they would never have been placed in that position if the other did not invade. He is the root cause. She will have him slaughtered for it.

She consoles herself with the thought. The red moon has been beckoned, the great hunt initiated. He will die before the morn. The current mortals lack the spark that shone so brilliantly in her children, but they don't need to be radiant to feed a fire that's already burning. They will see the night through. They always have.

The cosmos answers her call hesitantly, but it answers. She is not so diminished as that. The shadows of stars flicker around her; beneath their light, her burns heal, her cracked bones mend, pain washes from her tails. She leeches the spilled blood deep beneath the ground and recreates the hill from memory as well as she can. Trenches fill in. Scorched earth lightens, the coating of ash dissolving to nothing. A headstone shimmers into existence at the base of the tree; she takes the time to remember the inscription exactly, the name _Gehrman_ worn from the countless instances her youngest (though her eldest by age, and the thought makes her ache terribly) has traced its edges with light fingers.

Some scars remain. The flowers must grow in on their own. The little servants will tend to the wounds the tree has suffered. They will pass. The only potentially lasting consequence is the other's blood; she has no idea what it will do should it remain in her dream. She recalls nothing of this nature happening before to give her a reference. When she retrieves her child, disposing of it will be a priority.

She paces through the flowers, tails kept languid by force of will. The workshop sits in easy sight, just over the fence and up the other hill. She watches it, hair undulating slowly. She does not, as a general rule, visit that half of the dream. Sometimes she rests on the roof of the workshop, sprawled comfortably with her tails hanging over the side, but for the most part it holds no interest for her. Her children's toy house.

She does not know where her child has gone. She has the scent of the other's dream now, lingering like smoke in her memory, and it does not match the traces of her child's disappearance. She settles back on her haunches between the roots of the tree. The bond is still there, still strong, but she realizes while she follows it that she will not be able to reach the other side before the night ends. The distance stretches too far.

It's as she's pulling her attention back that a wave of contact ripples from the other side. She rises to her feet, reaches to meet it, and then it retreats sharply. Snaps taut. Breaks.

She stills, processing what small flecks she managed to grasp. A glimpse of another of her kind, and yet not of her kind – same and different, reflections through the water. Giratina, it named itself, guardian of a cosmos that is not, molded from stardust and the shadows between nebulae when the creator forced the multiverse into existence. It does not know who she is, did not manage in that brief moment of contact to recognize _what_ she is.

In its grasp, her child. Revulsion touches her, makes her fist her claws against the earth. Giratina is not of her kind, yet the similarities render them near enough that it is just as much a violation as it would be if the other was truly the one to snatch her child.

That it does not know what it holds is an excuse, not consolation. For those like them, ignorance is a failing which should not be forgiven.

She has a location, at least. Unfortunately, her child literally could not have traveled to a place more difficult for her to reach. This world lingers at the fringe, a frontier where the infinite cosmos beyond warps the structured reality imposed by the originator of universes; Giratina's dimension, meanwhile, is the core of existence. It is not merely distance. Arceus guards its prized worlds jealously from those who draw their power from the lawless cosmos. Should she attempt the journey, she will die.

So she will find a different way. The dream tethers them together, and she has resources aplenty at her disposal. She will not lose another child like this.


	4. Giratina

Giratina's still rather hung up over the role reversal. It tries not to pay much mind to the fluttering sense of annoyance and focus instead on the fact that whatever its own conflicted feelings on the situation, the creature's under the impression that the massive spectral dragon intends to kill it. Perspective.

It takes an inordinate amount of convincing before the creature's willing to believe otherwise. Giratina has no idea what it said to upset the creature, so it keeps quiet in the interests of not further exacerbating the misunderstanding by accident. Except the dragon's sudden silence _also_ sets it on edge. Any trust the creature had in it before has evaporated completely; everything Giratina does now, no matter how innocuous, comes across as threatening. Not an unusual state of matters on its own – Giratina's quite aware that some aspect of its appearance is frightening to most of the younger generations.

It can't, however, recall off the top of its head any specific instance where it wanted to calm something down that was scared of it. There's never been any point. Its standard interactions involve it herding some displaced creature back through a portal with the expectation that they'll never meet again. It's working off of trial and error.

There are other things it should probably be doing. A pignite is throwing out powerful fire attacks near enough to a vehicle transporting petroleum that it can't have any idea what it's actually risking. In a universe with no pokémon like Rayquaza to guard them from space debris, a comet three miles across is about to enter the atmosphere of a life-bearing planet; that, in truth, does not fall under its responsibility, but mass extinction events create a great deal of work for it when thousands of billions of creatures attempting to survive near-simultaneously wreak havoc on physics. Better to preempt the problem where possible.

But the Distortion World can manage that sort of minutiae without guidance for a good while; Giratina only quietly nudges it to intercept the comet. (Somewhat difficult with the restrictions, but a bit of creative interpretation technically qualifies the atmosphere as a mirror. A reflective surface, anyway. Arceus won't care enough to find out when it wakes up.) This, meanwhile, is... different.

The creature writes a rune. Giratina waits until it finishes backing away before moving over to read it. A sea that hides a truth under clear waters. It does know a disproportionate number of water-related words. Giratina is starting to get an inkling of the kind of world it comes from; though... it had the idea earlier, but not seriously, and it shrugs it off once more now. Plenty of things place an importance on large concentrations of liquid water, a source of life and closest material analogy to the cosmos. The creature's home universe is not one of the outer planes.

Snow scrapes. The creature lowers itself to the ground, pulling its injured leg close and rubbing the place where the limb ends below the knee joint.

Giratina turns its attention back to the rune. The one who spoke it backed it up with an entire concept, every possible variation of meaning woven together into a single utterance. In the current context, it's a complete non sequitur no matter how Giratina considers it. (With a vaguely guilty sort of deliberateness, Giratina does not consider the idea that it's asking for the sea so it can find a way home. It likely isn't true anyhow; Giratina finds it difficult to believe the creature would request any favors from it at the moment.)

The dragon reaches down a tendril, sliding the red claw at the end into a furrow, and then, after a moment, drags it through the snow, adding another line to the word. Maybe the creature misspoke, after all. It stares at the modified rune for a few seconds. Then it pushes the snow back into place over the addition.

It tries on different meanings for size, combining them, separating the individual parts into smaller components. It's all very counter-intuitive – words should mean exactly what they say, no more and certainly no less, with none of this picking and choosing at definitions. The fact that most mortal languages do just that contributed in large part to Giratina's difficulties with them before it stopped trying to keep up with their rapid rate of change. It's not going to quibble at the errors, though, no matter how much they impede comprehension; that the creature can speak even like this is astonishing.

More than a few parts of the word might fit. Several of them contradict each other. It's a mystery which ones the creature means to convey. Giratina makes the attempt regardless, making for any progress at all.

Eventually, it runs out of ideas and starts going back over options it discarded. The creature waits, sitting patiently enough that Giratina feels the need to look over every once in a while to check its condition. Even though most living things would have frozen over without an outside heat source by now, it doesn't seem adversely affected by the cold. Its temperature hasn't changed at all, even in the extremities farthest from the core.

Is it an ice type? Though it all but said outright that its world doesn't have pokémon, typing isn't exclusive to pokémon. Elemental types correspond fairly consistently across worlds since they all draw their power from the same source. It's how pokémon can so easily change their types; how Giratina, as with other ghosts, was preserved after its death. Fire is weak to water – occasionally that goes both ways, and very, very rarely they're entirely reversed, but they're always related in some manner. True fairies, the ones who like to call themselves good neighbors, fare poorly against certain metals, don't seem at first glance to subscribe to the same laws of reality as everything else, and have a talent for sussing out the weaknesses of their worlds' dragons. Regular animals, humans included, carry a mild resistance to every type.

The creature can't be normal, since the wind Giratina blew at it earlier affected it; in the same vein, it's not ghost or psychic when it took the attack as well as it did, even with Giratina deliberately holding back. It actively avoided the paralyzing wave, so not ground or electric. Certainly not flying. Fairies typically have that inimitable sort of confidence which comes from being able to disregard dragons as a threat; one need only look to Arceus, who becomes that much worse to treat with when the Pixie Plate is in use, especially now that... the advantage applies to Giratina as well. Steel's a possibility considering its weapons of choice, but if so, it's very evasive for a member of a type capable of withstanding most attacks head-on without taking much in the way of injury. No; on second thought, Giratina can't imagine it as a steel type.

The dragon's sidetracking. It focuses back on interpreting the word, checks and re-checks possible meanings again. The creature shifts in position once, setting its arm over its knee and hunching forward slightly. It shows no signs of impatience while day in the bordering world creeps towards noon, and when the shadows begin to fill in Giratina eyes it, wondering for the first time whether it actually intended for Giratina to understand when it wrote the word.

The dragon lets the thought go after only a moment. Nothing speaks that doesn't want to be heard.

In the end, it's not the creature that interrupts it. A quake ripples through the Distortion World. Giratina lifts its head, perfectly still as the wave shears inexorably closer. At the last moment before contact, it phases.

The strain of keeping itself together without a debateably physical form's aid overcomes the trepidation of what will happen when it rematerializes. As soon it reforms, it stabs its spikes into the ground as an anchor. It's successfully avoided the leading edge of the quake, which is some consolation. The surface of its form wavers, wisps of ectoplasm peeling off despite its best efforts. A distant part of it recognizes that other dimensions are being shaken out of alignment – nothing permanent, they'll settle on their own within a century, but in the meanwhile a few are going to brush against each other and Giratina should do something about that.

The storm takes some days to pass. Giratina's not sure when among those days its spikes hit permafrost and its body sank inches into the snow, but it finds that it doesn't mind. It drags its tail around to cover its head, filters its eyes against the blood that tries to seep in, and for a while sleeps.

Oddly, though not unpleasantly, it wakes to the scent of flowers. It pulls its tail away and sees that the creature seems to have dug up a patch of gravel, melted the ice off, and somehow coaxed pale flowers into growth. They glitter against the snow, alive as so very few things in this world are.

The creature itself lifts its hand from the plants, shaking off shining motes of pollen, stands, and tilts its head back as if to meet Giratina's gaze. _Creator_ , Giratina says, too tired despite the rest to vocalize. The creature understands well enough, though, going by the writing, and after a moment the dragon drifts into slumber again. It has no dreams.


	5. The Old Hunter

Several thousand years ago, Arceus fell into a long hibernation after losing a piece of itself to a grievous injury. Recently, it's begun to stir, and the energy of its awakening has been sending out intermittent shock waves.

Without the same awareness of its presence, you barely felt the quake but as a prickling of the hairs on the back of your neck, a quickening of breath that you corrected without fanfare. Giratina it flayed apart. Mixed in between the splashes of heady blood are strips of whatever material composes the Great One's body. When you tried to pick up a piece, it slipped like dust between your fingers and scattered to nothing.

Rather novel, seeing this from the outside after a long night spent on the receiving end. Although, whatever else one could truthfully say about the moon presence, she at least has never wrought damage of this extent by _accident_.

You can kill Giratina. Asleep, wounded – it would hardly have time to react if you called down a meteor storm. The thought's a clinical one, a detached visualization of procedure. Merely habit. You meet people with the expectation that you'll have to put a bullet in their head down the road. Simpler for everyone when the time comes if you have some idea already of how it should go.

It's a bad habit, really. You're not going to do anything to Giratina. Never were. You would rather return to the dream first.

You rest the heel of your palm over gauze, over an eyelid beneath it protecting nothing, focusing inwards. Faint though the brush of her mind is, the web of moonlight still blazes bright, the stars beyond its light dark and flickering as candles to the bonfire. You grimace under the mask. You did hope – well, not that it matters.

Carefully, quietly, you reach through the web. It took a while to discover that she doesn't think to maintain the net so long as you don't anger her. With how long it's been since she looked over it last, there are... not holes, nothing large enough to be called that, only areas where the threads have frayed or have loosened from their razor-wire tautness, barely widening the gaps. You can fit a small part of yourself through, enough to get a sense of what's on the other side.

Enough to bring something back. You've never really dared risk it, but she isn't watching now, and slowly you draw back in on yourself, cradling a dim glow away from the strings of the net.

You don't recall what temperature felt like, the difference between the warmth of sunlight and the coolness of the shade beneath an overhanging roof. The grain of the cosmos cupped in your hands, though, is _cold._ You have to hold at bay the urge to shrink away. Even through the gloves, the bones in your palms feel brittle and tender, itching with pain. You're not ready for this power.

You hold on to it until your fingers numb to the point you can't tell whether they're responding. You don't quite sigh then, and finally you let it fall into the lumenflowers. The plants don't need dregs of cosmic power once their seeds have sprouted, but it doesn't hurt them. It makes their blooms smell sweeter, and the doll tells you the color is better.

Usually you gather the power with A Call Beyond instead. While it might not be the usage Yharnam's Healing Church intended for the hunter tool, the phantasm itself has never protested, and the moon presence is only mildly disapproving. It's fine, you know she really loves you.

You can't think of anything more helpful to do. Your medical knowledge, even if it could apply to Great Ones and you had access to supplies, is near-entirely faulty. You used to regularly prescribe opium, just for starters. It was the accepted practice, and certainly it was better than no anesthetic at all, but you wince to think back on it. You wouldn't trust yourself within twenty feet of a modern operating table.

Giratina's healing well enough on its own, in any case. It's still missing a notable percentage of body mass, but the open wounds have closed over, and it was perfectly lucid during its brief bout of wakefulness. Regeneration's a useful skill.

Besides, you know from experience that the best things to have around are lumenflowers and a friendly voice. Not that you've been particularly friendly or much in the way of a voice, but Giratina plainly doesn't view you as anything remotely approaching a threat, which amounts to the same. It's better than being alone with her for company – just alone, for Giratina. You would make tea, too, if your hat wasn't the nearest thing to a pot around.

Since the Great One's not likely to wake again until it recovers, you sit down in arm's reach of the impromptu flower patch. Hard to stand for long on snow that a pegleg sinks eagerly through; feels like at any given moment you're half a movement away from tripping over yourself. You're not going to use the beast cutter or rifle as a crutch, either. You're not that old yet.

Well, maybe a little. You're frozen at the age you were when the night began, though, which was... what? ...Must have been two digits. Your children weren't yet grown when you left – one of them just starting an apprenticeship, the other... they were the same age. So thirty-something, perhaps. Thereabouts.

The doll might remember. She tends to know her hunters better than they know themselves.

Does she have an idea of what's happened? You toy with the idea of returning just to tell her. It's an entertaining thought.

You will need to go back at some point, before the moon presence does something even more drastic than usual. That's not up for argument. For now, though, you only breathe and marvel at how much lighter you feel without the constant weight of her attention.

You did worry earlier that you would have to return. It was plain idiocy on your part, attacking someone who up until then showed you not an ounce of ill will despite your intrusion on its territory, but – it said it would help you. With your leg. You got the implication that it meant it would find you a new one less awkward than the current wooden stump – no mention of how or where from, which was plain alarming.

A story you grew up with told of a deeply pious miller. He prayed regularly, burned offerings of animal offal at the solstices, hung fresh holly and mistletoe in the winter to ward off evil thoughts, donated at church, read the holy word to his children as bedtime tales, so on and so forth. Because of his deep piousness, dark spirits and tempters were drawn to him, all of them hoping to corrupt such a holy man, but the purity of his faith gave them no access.

Unbeknownst to him, however, he had already invited evil into his home: his wife had begat their eighth child by a different man.

(For added horror, you've heard it told with the man as the miller's brother. He's never brought up again either way.)

The miller eventually discovered what she did. The child was older by then, however, and he had already raised and loved it for many years as his own. For the first and only time in his life, he turned his back on the gods to help his wife conceal the deception from their church and neighbors.

The dark spirits immediately pounced on his weakness, and all his family but for him came down with an incurable plague. The wife and her bastard died on the spot. As one does.

When physicians failed to save his children, he naturally turned to prayer. But as he had abandoned the gods, so did the gods abandon him, and his prayers went unanswered. An evil spirit heard him instead and twisted his wishes back on themselves. He wanted his children to live, the evil spirit declared, so live they should; and it turned them into adders, which of course couldn't be afflicted by a human sickness. When the miller returned that day from trading for black pudding at the market, the snakes bit him to death, fled into the woods, and were all eaten by crows.

You're fairly certain that the evil spirit in the story was a benevolent Great One as well as the god the miller was praying to in the first place. Undoubtedly it meant well, but a Great One's idea of _helping_ does not typically align with the sort of thing the person being helped might actually appreciate, or benefit from.

While you know the Caryll runes for _no_ and _stop_ – several variations of them, in fact – they... Caryll runes are perfect transcriptions of a Great One's words. Enough meaning to fill an essay condensed into a single shape. Because the Great Ones aren't expecting to be recorded, they tend to go into a good amount of personal detail. Once you learned to read them past the surface meaning, it became a simple matter to identify through any rune what the original speaker's relationship with the target was and the context in which the word was spoken.

Every word you could have used to tell Giratina you don't want its help lays out comprehensively what you are to the moon presence.

That's between you and her. It's hardly anyone else's concern.

So you turned to your resort for when words fail. You expected negotiations to end then; the attack should have antagonized Giratina past any hope for reconciliation. Hostility can only be answered in kind. Even gentle, placid Rom defended herself with lethal force when she was roused.

Between a choice of letting Giratina squash you or actively trying to kill it first, you were gathering yourself to take the third option: returning to the hunter's dream, giving up an opportunity you're not likely to receive again in your lifetime. You implied to it that you don't know the way back so it wouldn't chase you out. In truth, staying here is a constant drain on your energy; returning, meanwhile, just means falling asleep. Or, if you're in something of a rush, hitting your head against a rock hard enough would do it.

But then Giratina _backed off_ , of all things.

It didn't stop so it could prepare an attack that would probably vaporize you if you let it connect. It simply called off the fight.

You're not actually sure that it's a Great One in the usual sense, not after that. Oh, it's certainly some sort of deity – its blood smells of starlight, if starlight could be as pungent and distracting as finely aged alcohol, with a sickly sweet undercurrent similar to that in the moon presence's. Only, it might not be Kin.

Which does raise the question of where you are. You didn't aim for anywhere specifically when you catapulted yourself out of the dream, just a place the moon presence couldn't immediately retrieve you from.

Maybe you could have come up with something a tad better thought-out if you had longer than a few seconds to work with. However, you could never have planned for a Great One directly invading her – your – your shared sanctum, which wasn't a possibility until it happened. You couldn't have been more surprised if Gehrman pulled himself out of the grave, or if the entire cosmos up and vanished. You couldn't wrap your mind around it even with him in easy shooting range, reeking of tomb-mold and pus from the blood that flowed freely without skin to halt it, wailing like a beast set aflame. What would have to happen to break a god?

The reality only clicked in time for you to get out of the path of his initial charge. The moon presence didn't descend until you already sawed off a limb (bad idea, as it turned out: the boneless hand thing exploded into caustic blood when it touched the ground, because of course it would) and spent near every bullet on you shooting half his eyes out. She moved with none of her usual liquid poise, so stunned by disbelief that she couldn't focus on controlling her body – even fractured as she is, never at her lowest has she considered personally going after another Great One in its own home. That's what she kept you for.

It's hectic enough keeping track of multiple combatants without them acting erratically on top of it all, and you couldn't predict either one of them in abilities or actions. (It was your first time witnessing the moon presence in combat, and it turns out that even by Great One standards her abilities are bizarre.) You were bound to get stuck in a bad position at some point. Honestly, you're mostly just relieved that it was the moon presence who knocked into you. The trespassing Great One weighed in the tons; you couldn't have survived a similar collision with him, and wouldn't that have been a way to go after all this time.

A few pertinent facts lined up for you on the way down:

You weren't necessary for the remainder of the fight. You did enough damage to the other Great One that the moon presence, freshly arrived and on her home ground, would have a difficult time losing. She still could, of course, but she's your god. You could stand to have faith in her.

The hunter's dream isn't meant to house more than a single Great One. Having two there destabilized it, leaving the rules a little more malleable than usual.

You were approaching the boundary of the dream, the least well-defined area even under normal circumstances.

The moon presence wasn't paying the least attention to you, wasn't paying attention to anything other than the foreign Great One in her dream.

And, if anything unprecedented happened, you had a ready scapegoat for her to attribute it to.

Spur-of-the-moment. A sudden, overwhelming realization that you did not want to be there. You lunged through the web, set every thread on it resounding like church bells, but the other Great One's cries deafened her. She didn't hear. And the cosmos answered.

Kind of it. It even dropped you somewhere interesting, in the company of a Great One who didn't try very hard to kill you despite your provoking it. You can't complain at all.

Now, what are the chances Giratina will pull you into its vendetta against Arceus?

You wipe snow over the beast cutter's teeth, teasing the blood off, then pat it dry on a section of your pants that the long coat kept safe from splatters. You hold no real fondness for it, but it is the weapon you're best with, and it's never done you wrong. Treating it right is a responsibility.

Then you reach under your coat, flip open a pouch on one of the belts, and slide out a deck of cards with thick droplets of dried glue marking the corners.

It's good to play on your own for once. You can't very well lose against yourself. Your many, many humiliating defeats have whittled away any hero worship the messengers felt for you, the little pests; the only thing you're better than them at is shuffling. (You can't claim even that much against the doll.)

Partway through the game, after a while of searching for a card to lay down, you switch to stacking towers instead. Using snow for support structures expands the range of possibilities by quite a bit.

A strong breeze topples your eight-storey tower before you can make it a nine-storey tower. You blow out a breath, then pick up the cards in reach and stand to go collect the rest. This is an invaluable deck, the only one of its kind. The dream has no others like it. The messengers will be disappointed if you lose part of it.

You'd like to get some backups, and maybe pick up a few board games while you're at it, but the messengers refuse to loot objects from the waking world for their own use or at the request of someone who isn't hunting. It's a matter of duty for them. You can't tell the doll to ask the hunters to bring something back to the dream, either. Hundreds have passed through the workshop while you've been host, and not one of them has been able to see her. Not _one_.

You're a bit torn. On the one hand, it's brilliantly resourceful to turn obliviousness into an impenetrable armor.

On the other, you think you've begun to understand how the Pthumerians felt about humans.

The wind picks up, and you pause. It smells like raw sewage thrown onto a fire. It also carries a rather potent airborne poison that might be intended to cause lung failure. There's no one else nearby so far as you can tell, so what...?

You flip through the deck, counting for any missing cards; they're all present, so you head in the direction the wind blew from. The scent grows stronger for a short distance, then weakens again. You backtrack to the spot where it's thick enough that you feel like your nostrils have clogged and pick a different path.

You mark out the boundaries of a cloud of toxic fog about ten feet in diameter. A circuit around the perimeter confirms that it isn't dispersing, content instead to stick in a clump right where it is. It takes some effort, but you manage to locate the source: in the center of the cloud is a sort of fold, inches across and rapidly shrinking, where space doesn't fit together properly.

Probably not a natural feature. You hold it open, stopping the rift from sealing over. It would be simple to pull it wide enough to step through.

Your hand falls. The distortion snaps neatly closed. The cloud smells frankly offensive, but that is not sufficient reason to risk your life marching recklessly into unknown and quite certainly hostile territory. You've no grudge against the entities on the other side worth slaughtering them for. You head back to the flowers that don't register the poison any more than you do and only wrinkle your nose when the fog occasionally loses a wisp your way.


	6. Giratina

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i dithered over this chapter trying to find a way to continue without retreading the Darkrai movie, but the corner i wrote myself into was pretty tight. here, have a retreading of the Darkrai movie.
> 
> on a brighter note(?), concrete backstory exists now for the Creation Trio + Arceus, the hunter, and not-Yharnam! (hoorah.) i didn't find any inconsistencies with stuff already established in-story, so nothing's really changed on that front. this is mostly just assurance that the story hopefully won't all be Giratina and pokémon, because i didn't write 3.5k words of not-Yharnam blundering themselves into almost as deep a hole as Yharnam for it to gather dust.

Giratina wakes up to a thoroughly welcome surprise: somehow, during the few scant days while it was incapacitated, its siblings have tried to murder one another. It twines about the crystals that look into Palkia's nightmare, seething.

One of the Distortion World's unguided attempts to mitigate the damage from their spat drifts too close. The dragon swats the pollusive cloud apart with more force than strictly necessary.

The creature's a more receptive audience than the unaware reflections of Giratina's siblings through the crystals, even though Giratina can't see it with it sitting on the dragon's head behind the crown. (Giratina's trying to make a trust exercise out of it. The dragon will trust the creature not to ram its blade downwards, and maybe in turn the creature will trust Giratina not to do whatever frightened it so much earlier.) Giratina puzzles out the cause behind the fight aloud, and though the creature doesn't speak, it reacts every once in a while with some very slight movement. Although it might simply be adjusting to a more comfortable position; Giratina's not sure which. The dragon is fairly confident it's listening, at least.

The conflict on its own wouldn't be out of the norm. What gives the dragon pause and makes the Reverse World flounder in its work is the genuine intent to harm behind their attacks. Dialga and Palkia aren't on especially good or sour terms, being largely ambivalent towards each other, but they're close in a way that Giratina has never come near to understanding. Which doesn't particularly make sense. They have little contact, and they're very different people – not polar opposites, nothing so drastic as that, but their personalities don't have much in the way of similarity either.

Still, it is what it is. They have their disagreements, and they argue, but they don't _fight_. On the rare occasions they come to blows, it's all posture and bluster. They don't need more when dealing with each other. A dispute over territory shouldn't have led to this.

Some investigative poking into the pieces of territory in question explains the disparity.

The vast majority of each of the siblings' realms is empty. They consider it a part of their territories still, but if, say, Palkia passed through the Distortion World on its way elsewhere, Giratina wouldn't give it a second thought.

If it passed through Giratina's _nightmare_ , that would... not that such would happen, but if it did – it wouldn't. In any case, each of their dreams is located in their own domains inside pockets of space not quite aligned with the rest of the dimension, and it seems like the quake knocked Palkia's and Dialga's dreamscapes into each other. For the two of them, it's akin to a mutual declaration of war.

A bit of movement from one of the windows catches Giratina's attention. It drifts nearer and peers through to spot a pair of starly flit overhead, one after the other. The window looks out from the surface of what's most likely a pond.

The dragon shifts the angle, looking for a shore, and finds a bridge instead, an arched construction of grey stone. A chinchou's golden bulb fills the view a moment later, and the crystal shimmers and fades as the reflection breaks.

It's populated. The town Palkia subsumed for its nightmare is populated.

It wasn't possible to tell before – the other crystals have their lines of sight halted by buildings, or are too far from the ground to see the movement on the paths – but Giratina didn't try too hard, either. It assumed naturally that the town was abandoned or that Palkia left most of the people living there outside. A baseless assumption, in retrospect. To Palkia, the main distinguishable difference between a krookodile and the sand it lives in is that one consists of a larger percentage of dihydrogen oxide. It might not have noticed that it dragged in some hundreds of thousands more living souls than the nightmare requires; if it did, Giratina doubts it cares.

How did it even find an entire town willing to house it? Worship of Palkia has dwindled among humans in the bordering world. Religion in general has: Giratina imagines it might be difficult to revere a pokémon, no matter how powerful, when even the newer individuals of one's species can easily acquire devices to capture them. They've moved on from asking others for answers to self-reliance. Giratina's watched the transition with considerable interest since it first realized what was happening. Humans do still worship, but the days of entire population centers unified in belief have passed.

A part of Giratina regrets the shift. There was a people some while ago, from before Giratina's death as well as the schism of pokémon and human societies, who worshiped Giratina. Giratina treasured them above nearly anything before or since. The dragon defended them from their enemies and natural disasters, watched over the new rulers while they grew, and walked the roads of their cities. When a mareep it interacted fairly regularly with came to it because the doctors said his human friend would die from an illness, Giratina took the human to a world where the people had a better understanding of biology, returning him after they cured him. Every household hung up mirrors so it could see in, and public buildings always kept a clear, reflective pool inside the main entrance for it to travel through. Theirs was the last language it learned.

There may never be others like them. But though Giratina tends to think back on them without much negative tint, that might be for the better. After expanding into an empire that covered three of the nine continents of the time, they turned their conflicts inwards. The new rulers and managers began to look at Giratina as a political symbol to be aimed against their opponents. When the dragon, irritated by the constant condescending vying for its support, stopped visiting the capital, most everyone interpreted the absence as the regime having lost its favor. While not untrue, they shouldn't have allowed Giratina's opinion to color their own to that extent; but they did, and the empire splintered into disparate factions before two decades passed.

That was before the schism, of course, and a host of other significant changes – the retreat of glaciers back to the poles, Regigigas's awakening and the latest continental shift, and the reinvention of agriculture by humans, among others. Since the split, humans have tended to be more fearful than reverent of powerful pokémon. They've developed fewer widespread religions, and the tone of their practices leans more towards practicality than awe.

Even those have begun to die away since the usage of pokéballs became mainstream. Scattered groups of humans still worship, but religion, by and large, has become dominated by pokémon, whose beliefs and practices vary widely between individuals. Very little remains that's organized or focused enough to construct a nightmare with, and certainly nothing centered on Giratina or its siblings, who rarely venture from their own realms and have been all but forgotten.

Well, it's not impossible that the dragon overlooked some people after all. Giratina rather doubts they could have anticipated the possibility of a nightmare when they started worshiping Palkia, though.

No, they definitely didn't. A puddle gives a blurry view of a human and a pikachu take off into the fog wall surrounding the town, and the reaction of them and their companions when the two come running back is clearly agitated.

There's not much to be done about it, though. All Giratina can do is open paths for the residents to evacuate through, but likely none of them would recognize the portals as anything benevolent.

...unless.

The creature stands before Giratina can propose the idea, one hand on the dragon's crown for balance, its first major reaction since Giratina mentioned Palkia's and Dialga's dreams colliding. That seems to be all. The dragon waits, but the creature does nothing else, and Giratina, somewhat more uncertainly, makes its request.

A few caveats, naturally. Keep near reflective surfaces – should it find itself at risk, or decide for any reason at all not to carry on, Giratina will bring it back immediately. Don't keep trying if its efforts aren't bearing fruit. Stay away from Palkia; don't draw its attention.

However, if it agrees, and if it succeeds in convincing the population to come to the Reverse World, Giratina will be able to open a path for them back into their own universe. The geography's a lost cause, of course, but the lives might be preserved.

Giratina's not entirely sure whether it wants the creature to refuse or accept. The plan, such at is, is a long shot, and would put the creature in a great deal of danger. If Palkia for whatever inane reason decides to attack it, or if the humans of the town mistake it for a pokémon and try to capture it (equally inane in the circumstances, but an unfortunately large proportion of humans have no sense of scale), there's a high likelihood Giratina won't be able to rescue it in time. Then there's the communication barrier to overcome – Giratina doesn't expect that it speaks the local human language, and it likely won't understand pokémon either.

Better if it refuses, actually. Giratina will just grab Palkia after it leaves its nightmare and force it to return the town, and hopefully that will happen before the residents wither from age, are taken by ghost pokémon, or fade into... it's Palkia, so most probably unown. That stands a much, much higher chance of success, and the only one likely to suffer injury, aside from the townspeople, would be Palkia.

The creature hasn't yet responded in any manner – since it doesn't have its runes as a support, there's a longer delay before it comprehends Giratina's words. With a much more feasible plan decided on, Giratina retracts the request before the creature can muster an answer.

It expects that to be the end of the matter.

Since it can't do anything about the nightmare – an unpleasant thought, but a true one, and there's no use in dwelling on it – the dragon looks out across the Distortion World, clicking its mandibles at the sight of the dark clouds marring the landscape.

The Reverse World will have an easier time annihilating the pollution if the stuff isn't clumped thickly together. The dragon will have to disperse the fog banks itself if it wants them cleared away anytime soon, which it very much does. The world won't be able to do its work as well as it should with Palkia and Dialga's detritus clogging up the gears. And the poison is a hazard.

More than that, though, it feels filthy to all of Giratina's senses. It's the result of Palkia and Dialga waging battle inside a dream that should never have been shared. Giratina wants it to have never existed; failing that, it wants it to cease existing with all possible haste.

Without preamble, the dragon gathers a ball of pure, uncolored energy between its mandibles and fires a hyper beam. The light shrieks and crackles through the air, obliterating instantly the first cloud it hits. Giratina turns its head, and the beam cuts around an island to shred through two other clouds. It manages another four before the orb, energy spent, collapses, and the mandibles snap closed.

The light vanishes immediately, but the roar takes a while longer to fade. By the time it does, Giratina has concluded that it does not feel any less irritated. On the contrary, really – that was the least efficient method of going about the task that it could have chosen.

For some reason, the notion of preparing a second beam remains incongruously tempting.

A few soft impacts against its crown steer its thoughts away.

The creature's blade swings out, its arc bringing it just short of the nearest floating crystal before retracting. There... aren't terribly many ways to misinterpret that. Giratina watches the scene through it – Palkia nestled in its force field, the window looking up from a negligible distance below it. The shield, in contrast to its occupant, is in constant flux, pink brightening and dimming in splotches across each layer; Palkia isn't too significantly injured.

Giratina asks the creature if it's certain. It doesn't reply, but it doesn't protest either.

The dragon winds its way over to a squat building. The interior isn't furnished in the Distortion World, and the large mirror in the room past the entrance doesn't exist, but at this distance Giratina can mark out objects on the other side of the dimensional barrier without effort.

The creature clambers over its crown, slides down to the dragon's mandibles, and jumps from there to the ground. Once it straightens, it rolls its shoulders. Adjusts its head covering. Turns its masked face to Giratina, who, oddly reluctant, looks away from it and tells the Distortion World to shift aside at the mirror.

The rush of wind that accompanies the portal's opening completely covers the sound the creature makes. Giratina doesn't hear it at all, only notices it for the faint vibrations at the air near its neck.

The creature stays still for long enough that Giratina wonders if it's having second thoughts. Then it rubs the heel of its palm against its forehead, shakes its head, makes a motion that would be a sideways glance towards Giratina if it came from a seeing creature, and walks through the hole in the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kind of interesting thing about the pokémon world: Palkia and Dialga came within literal inches of collateral damage-ing an entire town in the Darkrai movie, and it's made pretty clear that neither of them would have lost sleep over it. Kyogre and Groudon have been responsible for at least one cataclysmic event that altered the surface of the planet. i can't imagine Regigigas's landscape redecorating as having had no ill effects on the biosphere. Zapdos, Moltres, and Articuno nearly incidentally caused the apocalypse in the Lugia movie. Cyrus tried to destroy the universe.
> 
> yet Giratina's pokédex entry says it was banished for its violence. what could it possibly have done that was terrible enough to warrant that when Kyogre and Groudon got off virtually scot-free? ← the question most of its backstory for this fic was written with the goal of answering


	7. The Old Hunter

Cotton cloth and rubber. Turpentine, beeswax, linseed oil. Perfume, subtle but lingering, threaded through a heavy jumble of fur, feathers, dirt and stone dust, people... too much to stay there sorting apart, though a few pieces reach out for attention even after you've dismissed the rest.

A cobbler's shop, empty since – oh, not so long ago. You tap your false leg against the floor, careful not to scratch the wood boards, and listen to how the sound returns. Too much clutter, too many scattered obstacles, but you visualize the boundaries of the room with a few inches' error margin. A hollow space, probably a stairway, behind... that'd be a counter, and the wall farthest from it turns back the clearest echo.

You hold out a hand at waist height and step forward until your fingers knock into the heel of a shoe. You set the shoe back into place, then find the top of the shelf. Keeping your hand brushing over the wood, you make your way towards the window.

It's a good thing you're wearing gloves. Otherwise, the glass would be smeared with fingerprints by the time you divine that the entire wall and the door all make up the shopfront. They must have a way around the cost of glass and the poor insulation in cold weather.

The chimes overhead jingle when you push the glass door open. You stop, one foot on the cobbles, listening to gently ringing silver.

Some shops have those. That's right. It's been a while since you've walked through a town, and longer still since you walked through a town willing to use bells insignificantly. Your... you think it was your whitesmith who had them. You remember the chimes when you went to him after your daughter dented a cup in a fit of pique. She threw it at a wall – your head, actually, but her aim was always atrocious when she was upset – then spoke some sentiments that you've no doubt she meant wholeheartedly. Marcel, though less demonstrative, looked up from his hands whenever his twin touched on a topic he especially agreed with. They didn't care much for you at all in the beginning.

Then she stomped out the door and, once she came back, refused to look at you. She kept it up for the better part of a month before you made the mistake of telling your older brother of what happened. He made her stay with his family for a night; the next afternoon when you went to collect her, she was sullen but willing to give you a chance. You still haven't puzzled out what he could have said to her.

(To be fair, you haven't made much of an effort. You don't think about them often if you can help it: when you do, your thoughts inevitably twist towards how they might have died.)

...You're truly doing this, aren't you. Here you are again in a foreign city – one which, twelve footsteps into, already puts you far more in mind of your birthplace than of Yharnam – having been requested by a god to actually help a populace for motives and with parameters it only failed to convey fully because it made some incorrect assumptions about your knowledge base. History through a carnival mirror.

Well, best get on with it. You let the door swing closed.

You have a few plans laid out. Or one plan with a few variables. Glass half full, glass half empty. You'd really prefer to try finding the local ruling power and convincing them to organize an evacuation; unfortunately, that's out of your physical capabilities, so you'll make do with something a little less tidy.

Should it not work, you'll resort to a more precise approach, but you don't think that will be necessary. Emotional people tend to be easy to persuade into doing things they wouldn't normally consider, like traveling through portals of dubious origin to an unknown destination. Which, conveniently enough, is just what you have to persuade them into doing.

First, you'll need a public fountain or a park with a pond. You told yourself you wouldn't try for glass because it would be difficult to find at a proper size, but that excuse falls apart with how ubiquitous it is. It would be simpler, even, to use glass rather than water. Shallow, though. Plain glass, once cooled, has no character. As for mirrors, true mirrors – you could. You won't. You entered this nightmare through a mirror; that's quite enough.

If you get desperate enough, you'll consider them. Otherwise, you'd much rather use water.

Once you have that, you'll need to learn the locals' threat response and how developed a mob mentality they have.

There are people on the street. Three to the left, fifty feet away and stretching that distance farther at the same pace as each other, two of them speaking gravely but without urgency. Both men, both a good half foot taller than you. The quiet one, who's hovering a little ahead, is skipping. You would have an easier time identifying them if you had scent to work off of as well, but the air's stale and windless, weighted by Palkia's presence.

Two to the right, not together, and one of them walking towards you. You can pick out without any difficulty the instant that one notices you: the steady stride comes to a jarring halt punctuated by the scuff of their shoes against the cobbles. What must you look like to them? Nothing good, obviously, but that's neither specific nor particularly helpful – 

A quiet click, a less quiet rushing noise accompanied by crackling, and there's someone who's not Kin standing in front of them. Reflexively you take a step forwards, then catch yourself before you can be any more overtly threatening to the new arrival who was... beckoned? He can't have been. The human called on him so casually, and he answered readily. Summoning Kin isn't something done without ceremony at the merest suspicion of a threat. That's a good thing. When Kin and mortals mix, people on both sides tend to die messily, best of intentions notwithstanding. Simply because it's a part of the natural order doesn't mean it need occur too often.

But then again, he isn't Kin, is he?

There was no hint of the arcane involved in his appearance, either. He might have materialized out of – not air, you would have noticed him if he was merely gaseous. No, he might have materialized out of nothing at all.

You did want to know the locals' threat response. Evidently it's to conjure powerful magical entities from a source you can't immediately identify.

Well, better to find that out early. Immediately. Within minutes of arrival.

Typical, really.

You hope this person's the equivalent of a high-ranking Choir member. Realistically, though, with the way your luck runs they're probably an untested civilian and every other townsperson can duplicate the feat.

The person – young woman – speaks what's possibly a question and is certainly worried and suspicious. The not-Kin hisses, takes a small step forward on a clawed paw. You twitch for your weapons and only just clamp down on the urge to draw them. You chose the beast cutter and Ludwig's rifle for their sheer brute power. They maim when they don't kill, which is invaluable against multiple opponents but somewhat less useful against people you've no intention of hurting. The street's too narrow to use them well in, in any case. Bare hands only.

The woman's raised voice alerts the others on the street. The bulk of their attention settles on you rather than the not-Kin or even the woman, which is puzzling until you realize the implication.

When you suggested that everyone in the town knows the technique she used, it wasn't meant to be some sort of – some sort of _challenge_ , or – oh, but what does it matter.

The child tries to sidle nearer, but one of the adults pulls them behind him. Good man; you discount him from the list of potential combatants. He calls out, and the woman responds uncertainly. The not-Kin hisses again.

What is he if not Kin? He sources his power from the cosmos, but it's oddly diluted. Refracted, more like, a single instrument plucked out from the orchestra. It's expertly done, this fracturing. If you didn't know already that it's only a disconnected part, you doubt you would suspect that it's been split from a whole.

The cosmos is knowledge, creation, infinity, the cold dark that conceived light and the dreaming mind. To break it apart, to destroy the meaning of it – what does that leave behind?

The lone person steps up beside the woman and speaks to her in a voice that carries. Four lines into the conversation, the tone begins to angle from uncertainty towards conviction. The man behind you who hasn't yet contributed offers his own piece over your head, and then the rustle of a sleeve as he raises his arm, a familiar click – 

You're running before the rush of the summoning ends. The not-Kin leaps for you with a growl; he's small enough that you can quicken right through him without risk, and as soon as your foot hits the ground another quickening takes you past the humans.

They don't pursue. You take a turn, breaking line of sight, and slow to a walk.

Someone notices you. A few not-Kin sit clustered on a roof farther down the street, too close together for you to count, and another alone inside a house, but it's not any of them. It must be a human behind a wall or far enough away you can't hear them.

The attention doesn't waver, and you keep yourself from tapping your fingers against the beast cutter's handle. What about you stands out so much? The weapons? The armor? Your obviously foreign origins? Is it anything you can actually change?

Well, to the locals' credit, you might not need to make yourself less conspicuous. They're shockingly reasonable for people who attracted a Great One directly into their home. They marked you out as an anomaly, but weren't willing to act on it before they were more certain, or (the likelier option, with the direction the conversation sounded like it was going in) before they had safer numbers; when you fled, they didn't give chase because you offered them no reason to. They're not people who would chase someone simply for running away. Meaning that when other trouble comes up, you should be able to run away from that too.

It occurs to you the infrastructure here is significantly better maintained than Yharnam's or your hometown's. The town as a whole doesn't suffer a lingering undercurrent of blood or waste or sweat, a fair marker of a sewer system that, unlike your hometown's, functions as more than an oft-repeated metaphor for the government, and, unlike Yharnam's, isn't clogged with rotting bodies and giant diseased rats. You haven't come across so much as a single oddly sticky patch or misstepped on a poorly laid cobblestone, either. If you tried sprinting in Yharnam in your state while not already being intimately familiar with every shadowed corner, you wouldn't make it two steps without tripping over a curb or a pile of rubble or a corpse or a stairway or a crate or a crib or a wagon wheel or... it didn't feel like there was such an extensive list of things to trip over while you were haunting the streets. Hindsight lends a different perspective, you suppose. Or maybe just sight.

Conversely, the flatness of the town doesn't help at all. You keep expecting there to be an incline, but there's nothing at all. It shouldn't be too difficult to grow used to. Your hometown was flat as a board too, you recall. Still, it's disorientating. You worry a little that you'll get turned around and not even notice, though you're fairly sure that's an irrational concern. You're not completely incompetent.

The person's attention falls away on its own. You listen for a door opening behind you, but nothing happens, which you take as tentative confirmation of your theory about the townspeople not being hostile without some cause.

Concrete confirmation comes later: the next few humans (who you're only referring to as such at the moment for lack of another descriptor, as the people you'd normally call humans couldn't react nearly so calmly to arriving in a nightmare whether or not they were aware of what happened) who come across you only move to the other side of the street and stare as you pass. A few give what might be uncertain greetings, which you ignore for not knowing how to return them. The surprisingly ubiquitous not-Kin disregard you entirely, except for those at ground level, who skirt around you when you pass at only slightly more of a distance than they give to humans and the others of their kind. You might be a walking through a normal town on perfectly mundane business if you put from your mind the deliberate avoidance. It's nearly surreal.

Though admittedly you could make an identical argument for anything. Yharnam's Cathedral Ward, for instance, was a perfectly pleasant locale to spend part of a night in if one didn't mind the... well.

A few other factors ground you through the illusion. The first instance one of the voices with no tangible source sounds from directly behind you, you burst away about as fast as you've ever moved and swing the blade down on it. By the time thought catches up to reflex, you're already retracting the blade. It hit stone without passing through any resistance on the way. The chattering – which sounds a little panicked now that you pay attention (though you could be projecting) – hasn't changed in tone or trajectory. No harm done. It cuts off on its own as soon as it meets a wall.

You sling your weapons over your back after that. Drawing them will take a bit longer from there.

The locals react to the voices too, jumping or crying out when the things show up too close to them. They seem wary, perhaps somewhat frightened, but the voices never respond to them and cause no harm when they pass through a person. They're not ghosts. They might be leaking over from another dream, or a different layer of this one. If that's what they are, there's no reason for them to be immediately dangerous.

Besides that, the place is oddly muted for a city of this size, the streets nearly bare, shops closed, homes quiet. The paper globes strung across washing lines between the houses rustle on occasion, and you hear them clearly without trying to. Not empty, per se, but quiet.

On some level at least, they must be aware of Palkia. You can't imagine being able to miss it. Though you couldn't point out a direction, you know it's within the bounds of the nightmare like you know where your own leg is. It's simply there: in the mortar, in the stone, in the air you're bringing into your lungs to join with your blood and marrow. Given long enough, it will morph the town into something wholly new.

The real danger isn't what Palkia will turn the town into while it's here, though. The change won't happen in a single night. You're more concerned about what will happen when it leaves. It's spread thin, as if it invested no more than what it had to in order to take the town for itself. It hasn't tried to make a home of the place. It built this nightmare for a single reason and never meant for it to outlast its purpose. A more mercenary approach to dreaming than you're used to, but you're not without a frame of reference – Rom crafted something similar, if layered and intricate enough that this nightmare might have been cobbled together from building blocks in comparison.

You don't recall what became of the lake after you – killed her. Once you fled with the moon bearing down on you and Rom's blood unfurling like blossoms in the water beneath your feet, you weren't in any state to consider going back until it all stopped mattering. Under the paleblood sky, you weren't yourself. Weren't entirely yourself. You don't know. Maybe you were, but the rest of the town warped around you and left you untouched. You remember....

Nothing. You stop grinding the back of your wrist against your ear, shake your head, swallow. You nearly choke and hurriedly press your tongue against the inside of your teeth to staunch the cut. Nothing at all.

You don't know what will happen to the town when Palkia is through with it. If it will hold steady, if it will return to sunlight and the waking world, if it will disperse when Palkia wakes, as dreams so often do.

You'd rather not get the chance to find out. You've had... enough of being too late for the things that matter.

You find water in a decorative public fountain. A fairly large one, though not disproportionate for the size of the square it serves as the centerpiece of. Fair stalls clutter the edges of the open area, seating places between them and closer inwards, and not a small number of people filling in the blank space.

Most of the stalls have stopped selling. A few are, some half-heartedly and others clearly trying to take advantage of the vacant competition, but the majority have packed up their wares. They weren't prepared for this at all, were they? They chose a poor time for the celebration, if that's what it is and not merely the result of a cultural difference that makes their ordinary market seem like a fair to you. You'd suspect it to be the catalyst that allowed Palkia to make a nightmare of the city, but none of the locals seem to have any real idea what's happened. If they did, they'd be trying to do something about it, or at least have stronger feelings about the situation than listless worry.

The whole square smells faintly of fried cinnamon bread, the last warm food item still for sale. In the stillness, you're drawing attention.

The locals know about this place. It'll do.

You walk up to the fountain. You take a seat on the brim of the lower basin. You wait.

There are few things quite as suspicious as an armed person with their face covered sitting quietly in the middle of a public space at a spot not meant to be sat on. If the fact that you were accosted after doing nothing more incriminating than coming out of an unmanned shop is any indication, you're one of those things.

This shouldn't take long, thankfully. As more people notice you, you trample down the urge to bounce your leg. You'll only feel antsier if you show how on edge you are.

You're counting on the locals' rationality to a much greater extent than you're comfortable with. You don't think they'll come at you without giving some sort of warning first, like what happened earlier, but one case can't establish a pattern. If they do ambush you, the fountain might provide some brief cover, but the space around it is free of potential shields as far as you can tell. As far as you can tell – and that's part of the problem too. Some not insignificant part of you misses the hill, that place where you know every headstone hidden under the flowers and can orient yourself by the degree of the slope. You're clumsy enough in a fight without the terrain working against you as well. And as for that summoning technique....

You'll work things out. Or you won't. However it goes, you'll have tried; you've disappointed yourself enough to know better than to ask more than that.

Still. You rap your knuckles against the fountain's stone brim as a pair of humans, one with a feathered not-Kin balanced on their shoulder, approach. Here's to hoping you can accomplish a bit more than _trying_ this time, for all the good hope will do. You could do without a second city resting on the wizened remains of your conscience.


	8. Brock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> decompressing the movie's timeline was done out of necessity. adding the random AU elements wasn't, but it was fun.

Brock's pokédex has the time as four in the afternoon. Ash's, the last he saw him before the younger trainer joined the hunt for Darkrai, showed noon, and Dawn's hasn't twitched from eleven since the fog enveloped Alamos Town. He can't know how long it's been since Darkrai put the first of its victims to sleep. If he had to guess, he'd say it hasn't been fewer than six hours, and he'd be deliberately lowballing to counter the effect of stress on his time perception.

That might be why Nurse Joy chases him out of the pokécenter.

So he takes a walk, gets some air. Though his mind feels blurred with tiredness at the edges, he can't seriously consider resting. He's not afraid to close his eyes, the way he's certain some of those watching over the dreamers laid out on cots in the pokécenter's lobby are. He can see easily where they're coming from, but he can't feel the same way. His superstitions are a gym leader’s and a traveling trainer's superstitions. He has ones for contests and other trainers and gym circuits, the weather and the tall grass off the beaten routes and the darkest tunnels beneath mountains, but there's no room in him for false beliefs about a pokémon's abilities.

He's too worried to fall asleep, not too afraid. In the short term, a darkrai's ability is potent, debilitating, and not all that damaging. That changes in the long term, and they don’t know how near they are to that threshold where the constant, unabating fear becomes dangerous. There have been verified incidents in just the past fifty years of darkrai killing people and pokémon without touching a hair on their heads.

That won't happen in Alamos. Every victim is being gathered in the fully equipped pokémon center for Nurse Joy, a dozen volunteers, and trained medical pokémon to monitor. And Sudowoodo, the only one of Brock’s pokémon who Darkrai’s hurt, is a rock type. They can give steel types a run for their money when it comes to durability.

It’s easy to tell himself that.

Dawn, who's taking a break from the hunt by helping at the pokécenter, will probably make him leave again if he heads back too soon. To idle the time away, he finds a bench in a plaza still set up with stalls, though most stand unmanned with wares packed away, and strung across with paper globes. It doesn’t surprise him that no one there is speaking at louder than an indoor voice. Overcast shrouds the spires of the Space-Time Tower, the skyscraper-sized musical instrument that’s the town’s only tall structure. In the hazy light, even shadows are muted.

Their traveling group goes through worse than this on nearly a weekly basis, it seems like, but in most of the situations they get caught up in they at least have an idea from the beginning of where to look for the solution. Though Brock would bet something not very valuable against Darkrai being the sole orchestrator of what's happened to the town, he doesn't have any other suspects to offer up in the event that the mythical pokémon is exonerated.

Hopefully it'll only be a matter of time until the actual culprit gives itself away. He doesn't imagine anything that can do something on such a grand scale has any real sense of subterfuge.

He lets Croagunk and Happiny out. The pokémon quickly take in their surroundings, and then Croagunk's attention settles on Sudowoodo’s pokéball on Brock’s belt. “It’s just us. Sudowoodo is at the pokémon center still.” Croagunk looks up, meeting his eyes. “Nurse Joy will look after him.”

The pokémon holds his gaze for a moment longer, orange cheeks swelling enough to notice. Then he seems to deflate, hunching his back as he turns away. Happiny, meanwhile, climbs onto Brock's shoe to hug his leg, and he picks her up and settles her in his lap. She trills.

Darkrai are exceptionally rare. No one has managed an accurate count, but the League's last estimate puts their full worldwide population at no more than twelve or thirteen individuals. Aside from their strength and their affinity for nightmares, there's not much known about them. This – trapping a town in a wall of fog, keeping nearly a hundred people and pokémon asleep through all attempts to wake them up, bringing nightmares into reality – might be in the scope of their abilities. There are old, old legends in Sinnoh, even, of travelers happening upon villages recently abandoned, the residents vanished with no trace of their whereabouts, and the only creature for miles around a living shadow with a single sinister, glowing eye hovering over a bed with the empty covers still molded as if concealing bodies. Brock can't prove it isn't something darkrai are capable of.

He can't prove it is, either, and frankly he's skeptical. He’s from Kanto, the only region with no native dark species. Neighboring Johto has several, but the mountain range that serves as a natural border between the regions keeps them from crossing over. Kanto does have umbreon, one of eevee’s evolutions, but umbreon, like other dark pokémon whose previous forms don't carry that element, are famous among people of other regions for downplaying every negative stereotype about the dark element. Other regions’ insistence on typecasting dark pokémon as the villains in every story where they feature, to the point that in some Johto dialects the word for “dark type” is shared with the word for “evil”, used to seem inane to him.

Admittedly, trainers have logical reasons not to keep them. They're the most difficult type to train, even more so than dragons, being unruly, reluctant to follow orders, slow to learn how to behave in human society, and the most likely by far to lethally injure or attempt to lethally injure their opponent in a battle. Criminal organizations favor them for just those qualities, so real trainers who keep dark types on their teams are forced to deal with that stigma as well. All that accounted for, there's no real reason even to try training them – a school of thought that, going by the lack of a single dark gym in any region, is at least some centuries old. Their immunity to psychic attacks is valuable, as well as the effectiveness of their attacks against nearly every other type, but steel types can also resist psychic types to a lesser extent, and pokémon of other elements can also learn dark moves. Breeders generally avoid dark types for the same reasons as trainers, as well as for the extra maintenance required since dark types can't be kept with weaker pokémon, including with their own offspring.

As a counterpoint, dark types are so rarely used that few trainers have any experience battling them. In Johto, Hoenn, Unova, and Alola, most trainers defeated during the Elite Four challenge (or, for Alola, the island challenge) lose to the dark specialist, even those with teams packed with fairy, fighting, and bug types.

After leaving Kanto, Brock’s grown to understand where the people of other regions are coming from, but he still prefers to take stories about dark types with a block of salt. An entire elemental type being comprised nearly solely of psychopaths isn't a truth he's willing to accept, particularly since the Miracle Eye Experiment twelve years ago completely disproved it.

Despite his own feelings, though, if this was Pewter City and Brock was still a gym leader, he would be on the hunt too. He would be leading it. It’s only relatively recently that people have begun to see gyms mainly as milestones on a trainer’s journey. Their original purpose, and the one that League law recognizes as their primary one, is to be a settlement's main line of defence. That's why some small towns, particularly those in isolated areas cut off from the League's protection, have gyms despite not being on the recognized circuits.

Alamos isn't one of those towns. It does, however, have Baron Alberto, which comes down to the same. The title's only honorary – the League abolished noble titles’ legal status as one of its first acts on forming – but gyms, back when they were called pokémon schools and were the only organizations with access to battle-trained pokémon, were headed by the aristocracy. A proper aristocrat had to be a member of a school, and a proper school had to have the solid backing of an aristocratic family. Even now, the position of gym leader tends to be hereditary; Brock's own family has been in charge of their gym since long before the League came about. Alberto's family no longer heads a school, but the baron still serves the duty of mustering defences against threats to the town. He took control of the Darkrai situation too comfortably for it to be otherwise. Admittedly, his response could stand to be better organized if he wants any actual chance at killing or capturing Darkrai, but it's adequate enough that Brock doesn't feel pressured to advise or take over from him.

Neither will Brock join as part of the mob. He's of more use at the pokémon center helping Nurse Joy with her overload of patients. Protecting his city from pokémon was always his least favorite part of being a gym leader even when he could confirm the pokémon in question as a danger. If he can avoid it without hurting anyone through inaction, he doesn't see a reason not to.

A beautiful woman to admire would help him take his mind off things. He gets Ash instead. It's a workable substitute. Happiny squeaks a greeting as the younger trainer sits down heavily on the other end of the bench with a relieved sigh. Pikachu jumps from his shoulders to flop on the boards between them. “Is everything okay at the pokémon center?” Ash asks.

“No changes,” Brock says. “How is the situation with Darkrai going?”

“It's tiring itself out.”

“It's not the only one.” Ash is ragged around the edges, slumped against the back of the bench and feet only touching the ground at the heels. “I heard from Dawn that Alberto's been having you hunting in rounds, but you don't look like you've been off your feet since the sky lit up.”

“I went off on my own,” Ash says, which answers that question. Dawn has the sense not to needlessly push her limits, but Ash has never been anything if not bullheadedly stubborn. Without other trainers to back him up, he simply made sure not to leave any slack. “They still think Darkrai is responsible for everything, and they won't listen when I tell them it's not acting like it's guilty. I'm not actually sure how it's acting. Me and Pikachu find it, it stops running to fight, except the only moves it uses are double team or shock wave – ” Pikachu makes a questioning noise to echo Ash's confusion “ – before it runs again the first chance it gets. If it doesn't want to fight, it should hide, nothing would be able to find it, but it's… weird. It can't keep going on like this, it has to know that. Someone's going to defeat it, and….”

And they'll likely put it down. If it is responsible, that might clear the fog and return the town to normal. If it isn't, then he supposes they might think it's no great loss.

The vast majority of the trainers in town are Sinnoh natives, raised on stories of Cresselia defending the people of the region from the horrific things in the dark. Kanto has its own demons, but none quite so remarkably obvious about it as Sinnoh's darkrai with their nightmares and shadows and typing, and none that the last half century’s technological innovations haven’t stripped the myths away from and brought down to mundanity. The stories Brock read to his siblings featured haunter that dragged their former human families to the spirit world for not observing the proper funeral rites and hypno that cursed whole towns and ate the residents’ dreams to turn the people into hollow, soulless shells, but he’s always made sure that they know those are only stories. Hypno and haunter in reality are just regular pokémon.

Which doesn't mean they're not dangerous and shouldn't be avoided on dark paths at night, just that they're not complete fools that would launch one-'mon attacks on large gatherings of people.

“Are you trying to help it?” he asks.

“It hasn’t done anything wrong. I’ve been thinking and I don’t remember it attacking anyone when it wasn’t attacked first. At the tower, when it gave all those pokémon nightmares it only did that after Alberto’s lickilicky went after it first.” Ash scratches Pikachu behind the ears. “I’m not sure it really even wants to hurt anyone. Especially after what Alice and Tonio said. Her grandmother was friends with it, and it saved Alice's life. It needs to get a chance to explain itself. I'm pretty sure it knows what's actually going on, too, so if I can just talk to it we'll be able to find out what we should really be doing to fix this.”

“That's not going to be easy. Can it speak?”

“You heard it too.”

“I heard it repeat the same couple of phrases regardless of whether they fit the situation,” Brock says. “It picking up words it hears often is much more likely than a dark type learning a human language. 'Get out' and 'wrong' are the kind of words a darkrai that spent time around people would recognize. You haven't heard it respond to you, have you?”

Slowly, Ash says, “Pikachu surprised it sometimes even when it heard me call the move first.”

“If you want to let it explain itself, you'll need to find a pokémon that knows miracle eye.”

Ash brings out his pokédex. Pikachu picks himself up and, though he can't read, leans over to watch the screen while Ash types. His ears droop at the same time as Ash's face falls. “Oh.” It's a rare move. Brock thinks there might be a dozen species in the world that can learn it, and there's yet to be a technical machine made to teach it to pokémon outside of that list.

Ash can't have Pikachu ask it and then attempt to translate back from his starter, either. Dark types speak the same way as other pokémon do, but human psychics uniformly describe their speech as nigh impossible to understand. What little the psychics can decipher makes them uncomfortable to remain in the same room. Dark types' speech paints them as intensely emotional and selfish, only ever has the vaguest relation to the context at hand, and tends to be fragmented when not terse.

Up until very recently, it was thought to be simply a trait of the type in the same way that taking more damage from bugs is. About fifteen years ago, however, Kanto's Professor Oak solved the mystery of pokémon speech, overturning at least several hundred years of assumptions and an entire branch of linguistics dedicated to mapping out pokémon vocalizations. Though it's been a commonly acknowledged fact since antiquity that humans with psychic abilities can communicate with pokémon nearly on their own level, no one before him drew the link between psychic power and pokémon speech. Pokémon, Professor Oak found, directly understand intent and meaning. The primary purposes of the sounds they make are to emphasize emotion and just to indicate who's speaking, because most pokémon don't have their psychic ability well-developed enough to locate direction using that sense alone. The discovery explained how newly-hatched pokémon can immediately understand both humans and their own kind, as well as how different species can communicate freely with each other and convey complex ideas despite a very limited vocal range.

Professor Birch of Hoenn followed up with the Miracle Eye Experiment, in which he took a litter of poochyena and raised half of them under the permanent effects of the move miracle eye to render them susceptible to psychic abilities. After half a year of observation, he concluded that dark types' immunity to psychic abilities extends to pokémon's method of speech. They themselves can speak without impediment, but they don't know that they're speaking any more than they can pick up others' words.

Ash switches the pokédex off. “But I have to do something.”

What can he do? Create a distraction, lay a false trail, steer the other trainers away from their quarry... but no. “You can't sabotage them.” Unity is humans' only real, consistent advantage against threats. Regardless of how much Brock disagrees with what they're doing, he can't advocate for undermining the group's effort in a time of crisis.

A minute passes, then Ash sits up straight and says, “I can catch it.”

“Catch a darkrai?”

“And I'll let it go once this is over.”

Brock grimaces on reflex – catch and release is a trainer taboo somewhere above pokémon abuse and below gym badge fraud – then actually thinks it over. “That's not a bad idea. If you can cross the first hurdle and keep it inside a pokéball, you only need to make sure no one finds out, which shouldn't be hard. They don't have a reason to suspect. But a standard pokéball might not cut it with how strong Darkrai is. How many do you have on you right now?”

“I have six.”

Brock unzips his backpack and reaches into a pocket on the inside wall. “I have three normal pokéballs and three specialty ones. A heavy ball probably isn't what you're going to need, but these fast balls might help.”

“When did you get those?”

“I have no idea. They were sitting at the bottom of my last backpack, too.” He hands Ash the five miniaturized pokéballs.

“Thanks.”

“I can go with you. Croagunk can help keep it from fleeing. Right, Croagunk?” The pokémon makes a sound like nails scraping along a chalkboard underwater and looks back at him. It's a question, not an affirmative. “You weren't listening?” Brock checks.

Croagunk shrugs. Pikachu moves forwards to speak – explaining, Brock guesses. Partway through, Croagunk interrupts him, and once he finishes his piece the rodent flicks an ear and replies at some length.

During a pause for breath, Ash, who has the exceptionally rare ability to understand his starter pokémon to some extent, interjects. “And it might be able to wake up everyone it put to sleep. It'd make sense for it to know a counter for its own ability.”

“Is this about Sudowoodo?” Brock asks.

“Yeah. He doesn't want me to catch Darkrai, even if it's only for a little while.”

“Ash is right,” Brock says to his pokémon, “it's worth a try. Nothing's worked yet, but Darkrai should know something we don't.”

Instead of responding, Croagunk walks a few steps away, then stops and looks back at them. “We should get started?” Brock guesses. Croagunk nods.

Pikachu says something else, and Croagunk briefly points off towards the center of the square. “What was distracting him,” Ash translates.

It probably isn't a beautiful woman, but Brock's curious anyway. It takes him a moment to find it. He sees it right away, but the lighting's dim enough, and it's sitting so still on the brim of the fountain at the center of the square, that he passes it over as a statue at first.

Ash is already turning his pokédex back on. “Is that a pokémon?”

Immediately Brock says, “It's not a person,” though as soon the words pass from his mouth he can't recall why he spoke them so confidently. It's humanoid, after all, without any proportions that are strikingly off. As much as he can tell from this distance, its height fits; he pegs it as slightly taller than himself. And its coverings do look like clothes, if not in any fashion he's remotely familiar with. He's too far away to tell what the objects on its back are, or if they're in fact a part of its back; although some quality about them puts him in mind of the pictures he's seen of greninja with their water shuriken, they really could be anything at all. But the longer he watches, the more convinced he feels that he was right in his initial assessment.

The pokédex's inflectionless voice confirms it: _“Unknown pokémon.”_

“There's no type,” Ash says, awed. “It's just question marks.”

“That shouldn't happen.” Even if the pokédex doesn't know the species, it should be able to tell the type. Ash shows him the screen, though, which does indeed consist primarily of question marks. “We might be too far away for the scanner to get an accurate reading.”

Ash doesn't hesitate to take this as his cue to move closer – Pikachu clambers up the bench's back and leaps onto his shoulder as he gets up – but Brock stops him with a hand on his arm. “Ash, wait. There's something not right. The pokédex doesn't recognize it. It's a pokémon that hasn't been documented, so why is it so comfortable with being surrounded by people? Croagunk, how long has it been sitting there for?”

Croagunk grates an answer, gesturing at Ash. “Since right after Ash and Pikachu arrived?” The pokémon nods.

“That is kind of strange,” Ash says reluctantly.

“And think about the timing, too.”

“Do you think it's the one that did this to the town?”

“No, but I am saying it's a possibility. At least it might know more about what's happening than we do.”

“What should we do?”

“Tonio studies the town's history. If that pokémon's in any Alamos legends, there's a chance he'll be able to find out something about it. You have your pokédex out already; can you take a picture and send it to Dawn? Alice and Tonio were with her at the pokémon center when I left.” Brock waits for him to finish. “You still want to catch Darkrai, right?”

Ash's eyes widen. “I – yeah, I do. Wow, this is so exciting I almost forgot.”

“One of us can do that, and the other should stay to keep an eye on things here.”

Ash's hand finds the pocket where he stored the pokéballs. “I should go after Darkrai.”

“If you want to stay, I can go instead. You'll probably need to lend me one of your team, though. I don't want Croagunk going up against it alone.” Happiny chirrups with a distinctly offended air. “Even with Happiny's amazing moral support.”

“No,” says Ash more firmly, “I'm the one who wanted to do it. I should see it through.”

There's no real talking him out of a course of action once he gets like this. Brock doesn't have much reason to try, either. “If you're sure,” he says, and Ash nods. “Good luck, and be careful.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a couple of minor edits since the last update: 
> 
> chapters have names now!
> 
> chapter 6 has grown one whole extra paragraph (well, some of it was there before, just in different paragraphs) that hopefully goes a little ways towards giving a better idea of where Giratina's empire falls on the pokémon 'verse's timeline.


	9. Dawn

"It looks just like in the picture Ash sent. Hasn't it moved at all since he took the photo?”

“That's not too unusual,” Brock says. He's not squinting quite as much as he normally would be at this time of day. He still is, a little, but that's probably less to do with his light sensitivity and more because the lighting's just that bad. From an artist's standpoint, it's the sort of appalling that, instead of diluting with time, grows ever bitterer and frothier the longer it's given to steep. Where is its source? How and, in trinity's sight, _why_ is it grey? No crime depth and shading have ever committed can be so unforgivable that they deserve to be publicly humiliated this way. “There are pokémon who can go days without moving to conserve energy, or to conceal themselves as parts of the environment.”

“Like hibernation?”

“Not exactly. Pokémon that do that aren't asleep usually.”

Dawn takes his word for it, as she's learned to do for most things, and frowns thoughtfully at the pokémon on the waterwork. (She focuses entirely on the pokémon and not its and the fountain's lack of shadow. She doesn’t give in to the urge to go on another mental tangent over the lighting, no matter how justified and well-deserved it would be. Even though the square’s openness and the number of people and props it’s occupied by draw more attention to the lack of contrasts. Even though the improbable half-light is genuinely the most offensive thing she’s ever seen. All the rest of the world will forever be dimmer in Dawn’s eyes, stained irreparably by the association of existing in the same universe as a sight this harshly bland. But she isn’t going to think this, because she is a valiant and magnanimous soul above such things, and also because she’ll be here all day if she lets herself get started.) The pokémon looks remarkably human. Ash's pokédex registered it, and her own did as well just moments earlier, and it's not as if she's doubting her handiest traveling companion, but maybe she is. Only a tiny bit. She wonders what the first person to ever see a gardevoir must have thought.

“Did Ash try talking to it?”

“He didn’t. Oh, I should have suggested it.” He smiles, self-deprecating. “I’ve known him for four years, and I still keep forgetting that that’s an option for him.”

“Ash doesn’t remember half the time either, just to be fair.”

It’s a strange thing to forget so often, and so inconsistently. Though he seems to always remember it when he's outnumbered. She suspects that, on some level, it must be purposeful. There’s not much reason to talk something out when battling is just as legitimate a form of conflict resolution, and a much more exciting one to boot. If she had the ability too instead of only being able to marvel at it from outside, she’d honestly probably do the same.

“Where did he go, anyway?”

“He's looking for Darkrai,” Brock says.

“But,” says Dawn, pointing at the center of the square, “new pokémon! He doesn't care? He can't not care.”

“He wanted to stay, but Darkrai's more important for now. We don't know for certain that this pokémon's related to what happened.”

“You actually convinced him of that? Woah.”

“It was his own idea.”

“Wait, for real? He must be taking this a lot more seriously than I thought.”

“How seriously did you think he was taking it?”

“You and him have been getting involved in stuff like this since way before I met you guys, right? Everything always works out in the end. It's bigger than, like, breakfast, but it's not the end of the world. And it's not even just our group pushing through alone this time! We have a whole town working together. It'll be fine. So, has anyone tried getting close to the pokémon?”

“Not yet,” he answers. “Any other time and someone would have by now, especially with this many trainers in town.”

“But it's not _doing_ anything, and Darkrai is,” Dawn finishes. “Have to prioritize. Even if this pokémon is...” not doing anything. Sitting, same as plenty of the people around the square are, including Brock. Waiting. Watching. “Piplup, come out!” Her partner appears by her feet in a flash of light. “ _We're_ going to do something.” Piplup fluffs its chest feathers and nods once.

Dawn takes a step, then a thought comes to her and she spins around. “Why haven't you?”

“Like you said, it's not doing any harm. I don't want to give it a reason if that's what it's waiting for. Also, I only have one battling pokémon right now, and we don't have any information.”

She takes in Croagunk sitting on the bench beside Brock, then compares him to the unknown pokémon. She's not an expert on this, but human-shaped pokémon tend to be psychic or fighting types, don't they? Croagunk's poison and fighting, meaning a double weakness if the other pokémon turns out to be psychic.

She didn't consider that. Or that the pokémon might be waiting for someone else to make a move first. She was planning to pick a fight and then figure out the rest in media res, like she usually does with impromptu battles, but this is a different situation. It's a toss-up whether a wild pokémon knows League rules, and if it's willing to abide by any of them if it does, and she doesn't have Ash and Brock for backup if something goes wrong.

“What normally happens when a large wild pokémon that's never been seen before comes into a town?”

“Depends a lot on who's around. If there's a ranger nearby, they'll try to put a tracking device on it before they chase it out. Otherwise, they'll just run it off – which isn't possible right now – or try to catch it.” He pauses. “If it looks like it will cause a lot of damage and it's too strong to catch or scare away, they might put it down instead. But that's absolutely a last resort.”

Like with Darkrai. It's done something strange to the town, covering it in a fog and twisting all the paths out to somehow lead back in. It's hurt a lot of people and pokémon, too, including two who she knows.

A few hours ago, she was basically fine with hunting it down. Not happy about it, but it needed to be done. She's a trainer now. It's her responsibility to protect others alongside the pokémon she's befriended and trained. That was before Tonio told them about how it saved Alice's life years ago, though. Dawn knows Alice and Tonio are worried about it – Alice moreso than Tonio, but he would be upset too if something happens. A pokémon can't be all bad if it has people who care for it, and a pokémon who caught a girl who fell off a cliff and brought her safe to the ground probably isn’t the same pokémon who would terrorize a town for its own enjoyment. It's strange that the pokémon in question is a darkrai, but maybe this one is different?

She wants to hear its side of the story. It's an idea she'll run by everyone else when she joins them again. Even if Darkrai can’t explain well enough with words, there might be someone in town with a pokémon that knows miracle eye. Those pokémon aren’t especially common, but most of the trainers gathered in town are passing through for the festival and contest, and some of the psychic types that learn the move can perform beautifully in contests even under uninspired coordinators. It’s not impossible that someone has one. And, if no one does, Darkrai understands the common language, so Dawn can teach it charades to supplement its limited speech. She’s good at charades.

“We can't wait forever.” Brock only has one pokémon, who might have a debilitating type disadvantage. His caution makes sense. She has four, though. “Piplup – ”

Two figures peel away from the edge of the square. From the backpacks, they're either trainers or middle schoolers. The chatot on the girl's shoulder doesn't indicate either way, since the birds make just as good household pets as they do battlers. Dawn shades her eyes out of habit, and by squinting she makes out three or four pokéballs on the boy's belt. “I'm getting closer,” she says.

The wild pokémon rises when the trainers stop about twenty feet away. There's something strange about the motion, a slight awkwardness that passes by as soon as it stands fully. Dawn makes nothing of it, since she doesn't know the species and doesn't know their habits, but Brock, who followed her in edging nearer, says, “It's injured. Did you see it favor its right? Looks like an old wound.”

“How can you tell it's old?”

“It's not acting as if it's in pain. Either the injury's healed so it doesn't hurt or the pokémon is accustomed enough to the pain for it to not react anymore.”

It doesn't react to the bibarel the boy sends out, either, not even turning its head to track the other pokémon's appearance. The bibarel slaps its rounded tail on the ground and presses itself low, preparing for a leap.

“Aqua jet!”

Less than a second after shooting forwards the bibarel hits the fountain's upper basin and about-faces, teeth-bared, as the water enveloping it falls apart to splash into the pool. Its trainer doesn't give another order. Dawn can't see his expression from this angle, but she doesn't need to to guess that he's shocked to silence.

The wild pokémon, luckily, stays patiently still while he collects himself. The wild pokémon who _sidestepped_ an aqua jet, one of the quickest moves in existence to execute, launched at it from three or four yards away. A simple sidestep without any extra movement, the most economical possible dodge, decided on and executed in a bare instant – it's the kind of reflex Dawn expects from Pikachu or any pokémon on a team that reached the final round in a regional conference or championship challenge.

Still, a single dodged attack doesn’t exactly determine the fight. “Aqua jet!” the trainer shouts, and again the other pokémon moves aside as the bibarel shoots past, turning as it does to face the normal and water type once it impacts the ground. The first time wasn’t a fluke.

“It’s not going to attack?” Brock says as the trainer barks, “Water gun!” It just as easily avoids the focused stream of water from the bibarel’s mouth, then jumps neatly away when the bibarel swings its head to follow. It starts to circle, unhurried.

“Yawn!”

“Look away!” Dawn hisses to Piplup, who hurriedly slaps its flippers over its eyes.

The bibarel yawns loudly, taking full advantage of the wild pokémon’s passiveness to drag the theatrics out for a long fifteen seconds. Why doesn't the pokémon interrupt it? “Inner focus?” she asks Brock. That would make a little more sense, if it's using a move that just isn't visible.

“Might be,” he says, “but it already had time to buff itself.”

“It could be following League rules.” By them, a trainer isn't allowed to have their pokémon strengthen itself through registered moves before the battle begins. Some wild pokémon follow the same restrictions during trainer battles, though mostly it's only the ones who want to be captured that do it.

“You think so?”

Dawn fights down a yawn of her own as the sound dies and looks back to see the other pokémon still circling. It shouldn't be doing that. Unless it has insomnia, it only has a few minutes before the drowsiness overcomes it. Delaying like it is doesn't do anything besides cost it valuable time. Unless that's what it's after? Why did it show up in Alamos now and put itself in a place that draws attention?

It finally makes a move, rushing towards the bibarel. The trainer waits until it's nearly reached his pokémon before ordering, “Aqua jet!” It's a good choice. No matter how fast a pokémon is, they're not going to be able to dodge an aqua jet from that distance.

Dawn blinks at the wrong moment and misses what happens. One moment the bibarel is on the ground with the other pokémon approaching it, and then the next she sees it's in the air half the square away, shedding water and momentum as it aborts the attack, and the other pokémon's still running forwards as if it wasn't even slightly interrupted. Did – did the bibarel miss? No, it can't possibly have, not at that range and while facing its target. And the other pokémon's not following it. What is –

“Croagunk,” Brock rasps, an odd note in his voice she can't remember if she's ever heard before, “poison jab _now_.”

The pokémon comes to a stop in front of the trainer. Even at this distance, Dawn can tell the motions are perfectly gentle when it lays its hand in his hair and lifts his face towards it, and that the fingers it sets against his skin are positioned around his eye.

“Ice beam!” she shouts.

The pokémon flinches from the chatot that's suddenly in its face cawing and pecking, and the other trainer uses the distraction to grab her friend's wrist and drag him away. The pokémon phases into mist that drifts away from the chatot. Piplup's ice beam hits it as it reforms (“Good aim,” she says), and by the time Croagunk reaches it a thick layer of ice traps everything below its left elbow.

Around the square, flashes of light accompany pokémon being released. Most of the pokémon let out stay near their humans, focused on protecting them if the fight strays their way, but a few other people there are trainers too.

Nearly every trainer Dawn knows about fights wild pokémon fairly, using only a single pokémon at a time and refusing help from other trainers, but that changes the moment either the trainer or their pokémon are in genuine danger. “Piplup,” Dawn begins, about to tell it to get closer. Before she says anything more, it salutes her, turns, and charges as fast as its little feet can carry it towards the fray, flapping its wings for extra speed.

The wild pokémon swings its arm, trying to shake the ice off, but stops as soon as Croagunk stabs poison-filled fingers towards its thigh, which is about the highest he can reach. It passes into mist – a ghost type? – comes out behind Croagunk, and clocks him over the head with its frozen limb hard enough to send him to the ground. A staravia's gust knocks it off balance before it can follow up the attack.

Croagunk picks himself up, rubbing his head. Piplup skids to a stop next to him to help him stand while the staravia dive-bombs the wild pokémon. The wild pokémon strafes away nearly into the path of a rapidash's flame-wreathed charge, then grabs one of the staravia's legs above its claws as the bird is pulling up and throws it forwards just as a manectric discharges the electricity building in its mane.

The bird flops limp to the ground at the end of its arc, feathers sticking up every which way. Its trainer recalls it, glaring the whole while at the manectric's sheepish trainer, and, possibly for spite, chooses a wooper with an electric immunity to send out next. It's probably a good precaution, actually. Dawn eyes Piplup a little worriedly. She's seen Pikachu fight and had Pachirisu for long enough to know that, unless everyone involved is very careful about positioning, electric types have a hard time avoiding friendly fire.

But Piplup's known Pikachu and Pachirisu as long as Dawn has. It knows how to handle itself. It hasn't put its back to the manectric yet.

“Piplup, ice beam at the ground!” she calls. It cottons on and starts freezing over the cobbles under the wild pokémon's feet in an attempt to take out some of its mobility. The pokémon starts towards it, but the chatot blocks its way and starts caterwauling loud enough that even Dawn winces. Piplup and Croagunk cover their ears, Piplup keeping at ice beam despite the noise, and the wild pokémon jerks back in a full-body flinch and turns into fog, which is a weird reaction. Dawn's never seen or heard of a ghost type being caught off guard by loud noises before. They're always the ones doing the catching. The pokémon doesn't have eyes that she's able to tell, though, so maybe its hearing is more sensitive.

She suddenly smells something oddly coppery that puts her in mind of blood, though she doesn't think that's what it is. Brock sniffs and says, “That's odor sleuth. The manectric must have used it.”

“What's it for?”

A current of water smashes into the fog. Instead of parting it harmlessly, the bibarel's aqua jet carries the mist with it for a dozen feet before the cloud flows out from in front of it. The wild pokémon reforms staggering, and then the ice robs it of its footing completely. It ghosts before it falls and quickly rematerializes upright to block the wooper's mud shot with its frozen arm and take a hail of Croagunk's poison stings to the back, though Dawn's not sure if it even notices that attack. The stings might be too small to get through its clothing.

Brock says, “It makes its target easier to hit and lets moves affect ghosts. It's usually more effective. The aqua jet should have done full damage.”

The chatot flaps up to its ear and wails in a perfect imitation of a fire alarm if fire alarms were about twice as loud, but this time the other pokémon clubs it instead of balking. Dawn is starting to wish that Piplup could have missed the first ice beam. The pokémon ducks another mud shot and a water gun from the bibarel and sidesteps Piplup's bubble beam – which her starter stops using almost immediately anyway so it can flail away from the stray mud shot dropping towards it – while the chatot beats its wings wildly to recover from the spin the hit sent it into. Which is when the manectric lets off another thunderbolt. Dawn winces.

The chatot's trainer shrieks. “ _Why_?” she yells at the manectric's trainer. “Why do you hate birds!?”

As an argument starts up on that side, Brock waves to catch everyone else's attention. “How about we take turns?”

“Yes, thank you! Get your pipsqueaks out of the way so we don't have to run them over!” the rapidash's trainer responds. His pokémon tosses its head away from him to snort a puff of flame, shifting restlessly in place.

Piplup squawks, offended. “Piplup, no, come on,” says Dawn, beckoning it over. It spits a bubble on the ground in the direction of the rapidash's trainer and scurries back to Dawn. Croagunk backs away from the wild pokémon with better grace, and the wooper's and bibarel's trainers call them back as well.

The rapidash steps forwards, firey mane and tail billowing in a nonexistent wind. Its opponent doesn't turn to it until the other pokémon have all rejoined their trainers, and then the wild pokémon stomps to crack the ice while the fires at the rapidash's hooves rise to cover it up to the horn on its forehead.

Dawn had a rapidash phase as a kid. It only went on for a few weeks, starting when their neighbors down the road bought a ponyta and ending when they sold him after a thunderstorm nearly spooked him into setting the house on fire (they were and still are anti-pokéball), but she got pretty into it while it lasted. She hasn't forgotten the numbers – unburdened, in five seconds they can accelerate from standstill to one hundred fifty miles per hour, a pace they can hold for nearly a minute.

It can't go that fast in an enclosed area, not because it can't work up the speed but because it doesn't have the room to slow down in. It's still blisteringly fast, though. She only sees its charge as a red streak, and then it's pulling up and swinging around before it hits anyone at the edge of the square.

By the fountain, the other pokémon turns its fall into a roll that brings it back to its feet. It shakes its arm. Ice crumbles off in chunks outlined by the cracks that spread out from a horn-shaped dent. It tugs its left glove up, reaches under its long coat with its other hand, and comes out with something small and pale. Dawn doesn't piece together what it is until the pokémon slides it without any hesitation over its exposed wrist and a line of red wells up against its washed-out skin.

Dawn says, “It just – ”

Some pokémon moves hurt the user, she knows that. Recoil damage is the most obvious example, alongside moves so powerful that they lower the user's defenses, speed, or attack power for hours or days afterwards. Rest is a relatively common move too that puts its user into a deep sleep in exchange for healing them of most injuries and afflictions.

But there are also moves that badly injure or straight-up knock out the user in return for damaging the enemy or for bestowing a beneficial effect on the user or an ally. Trained pokémon tend to avoid them. Pokémon don't mind being told to use any of them – the reason those types of moves are so rarely used, actually, is because of how few _trainers_ are willing to give the order. Recoil from a volt tackle is one thing. Telling a poliwhirl to beat its own stomach hard enough to bruise is another altogether.

Even on a wild pokémon that went after a person, watching it hurt itself isn't a pleasant feeling. It stows the knife away and takes out something else about the same size and color, pressing it to the cut. She swears the thing wriggles before the pokémon pushes it up to its palm and pulls the glove down to cover the wound.

The pokémon's back is to the rapidash's trainer – he doesn't know what it did. Dawn doesn't recognize the move either, but attacks with a cost are invariably really strong. She calls out to warn him, but he's already saying, “Smart strike again!”

The pokémon turns aside from the rapidash and clasps its hands above its head. As fire envelops the rapidash, a small ball of light gathers over the wild pokémon, bright enough Dawn can't look at it directly.

The globe splits apart into dozens of tiny stars at the same time as the rapidash bursts into a gallop, and then there are a lot of explosions.

When the whooshing sounds end and the lights stop flashing, the rapidash is cantering to a shaky stop midways between its trainer and opponent, stark white marks marring its cream coat on its head, back, forelegs, and ankles. Its flaming mane and tail burn close its body, scarlet the whole way through. The wild pokémon is lying on its back on the ground. It reaches up, grabs the fountain's brim to pull itself to its feet, but as soon as it reaches a sitting position doubles over. A second later it wavers into fog and reforms standing with the fountain supporting most of its weight, its left arm wrapped tightly around its midsection.

It turns away from Dawn, free hand reaching up, and then it shudders with a cough. Dark flecks fall into the water. It looks away from the fountain a moment later.

The rapidash's flames flare out, oranges flickering back into existence. It trots back to its trainer, who pats its neck and speaks into its ear as he inspects the markings the wild pokémon's attack left behind.

“It's strong,” Dawn says. The rapidash's tail is long enough to brush the cobblestones again. It looks none the worse for wear, even the white spots beginning to shrink and disappear, while its opponent is in a state that would have any decent trainer switching it out.

“No,” says Brock. At Dawn's surprised look, he backtracks. “No, I mean that rapidash is strong, but – look at its flames. The warmest they've been is orange, and only at the base. If we're talking how much damage it can inflict with one attack, it shouldn't be much more powerful than Piplup.” Her starter preens. She nudges it with her shoe before its ego puffs up too much. “Can you remember the ghost getting hit by an attack before this?”

“Piplup hit it. It wasn't the only one that did.”

“The aqua jet.”

“And there were others too?”

He shakes his head. “Avoided or blocked.”

Any one of those moves it didn't let itself be struck by would have taken it out if they'd hit, is what he's saying. “So why didn't it avoid the rapidash's attack?” The rapidash is fast, but at that speed Dawn can't imagine it can adjust direction very well. If the other pokémon did what it had with the aqua jets, the rapidash might have missed.

“Smart strike can't be dodged.”

“ _Oh_ , okay.”

She's not sure if anyone really has any idea how they work, but the fact remains that there exist moves that simply don't miss. As long as the user isn't interrupted and the target is in range, not invulnerable, and not behind an obstacle, those attacks have a one hundred percent chance of connecting from the moment they're initiated. The user might have been blinded, deafened, and confused, the target might be hiding behind a hundred layers of illusions, and the success rate still won't change. Some pokémon can take the accuracy further, not only striking the opponent but choosing specifically where to land the hit; and then there are pokémon who go in a different direction to reach a point where they can _only_ hit certain areas of the body. Cynthia's garchomp is infamous for, among plenty of other things, not using aerial ace in matches – in the Sinnoh Champion's own words, “I don't count murder as a victory condition.” The rapidash isn't nearly as skilled as that, but a move that can't be avoided is a bad match-up at any level for something whose primary survival strategy involves not getting hit.

There's movement at one of the streets leading into the square: the arrival of a group of twelve or so trainers (plus Team Rocket playing at news reporting), headed by a lickilicky – Baron Alberto in the shape his pokémon's nightmare pushed him into. Alberto grabs the nearest person's attention. From the looks of it, he's demanding a situation report from the very confused woman being accosted by a talking lickilicky.

The rapidash's trainer crosses the distance towards the fountain, his pokémon keeping pace at his side, and stops well out of reach of the wild pokémon. He primes the pokéball in his hand, enlarging it from its storage size. “Won't work,” Brock says, and, true enough, the pokémon loses tangibility as soon as the capture device nears it. The ball touches ground behind it and rolls away. Without hiring an exorcist, the only two ways to catch most ghosts are to take them by surprise or convince them to let themselves be caught.

The trainer briefly looks frustrated before smoothing the expression over and trying for the latter option. Dawn doesn't catch most of what he says, but she hears enough snatches to get the gist. It's injured, he can take it to a pokécenter for healing, he's a good trainer, that sort of thing. He speaks easily, devoid of self-consciousness despite devolving often into rambling tangents and personal commentary, in the manner of a trainer who's spent too long on the road with no one but himself and his team for steady company.

He moves as he talks, closing the gap between them a tiny bit every few sentences. Dawn's not sure he realizes he's doing it. The pokémon is human-shaped enough that he might be unconsciously trying to get into conversation range. He doesn't look like he's in danger, though – he's still a decent distance away, and his rapidash practically glued itself to his side. With odor sleuth in effect, the wild pokémon won't be able to pass through it to reach him.

When he begins to slow down from the lack of response, the pokémon turns away and gingerly sits back on the fountain, just as it was before it was disturbed. Dawn thinks it might just be taking its weight off its feet, but the trainer interprets it as a dismissal. He startles forward, breaking off from his monologue, and the instant he moves ahead of his rapidash the ghost turns into mist and blows towards him faster than she can remember it moving yet.

The rapidash plants itself in front of its trainer even faster. The pokémon reappears bringing its shining hand down, and when it contacts the ground a column of electricity streaks down from the air in front of the pokémon, like a thunder attack that's been split into small strands from one large bolt, and then another booms down past that, and another, in a successive line of lightning. The rapidash rears up, but doesn't try to get out of the attack's path – to shield its trainer, Dawn realizes, which is admirable but mostly just silly. Lightning is practically harmless. The last three columns in the chain converge on its horn, and it lights up in a crackling blue flash while the other pokémon drifts uncontested around it. As soon as the light dies, it falls to all fours, and then its legs fold as it drops unconscious.

The trainer tries to pull back, but the pokémon's grip closes on his shoulder. It sweeps a thin, tapered leg out to knock his feet out from under him and then scoops him up in a bridal carry.

“Piplup – ” Dawn says at the same time as Piplup fires an ice beam. The pokémon starts to make a break for it, but the trainer's struggling knocks it off balance. The beam connects with it near the ground. It only hits the trailing end of its coat, though, instead of sticking its feet in place like Piplup was trying for, and as soon as the pokémon adjusts its hold on the trainer it starts running again – towards the fountain, inexplicably. Before anyone can stop it, it reaches the fountain, twists around without slowing and tips backwards into the water without a splash.

Neither pokémon nor trainer resurfaces.

The first person in the square to move is Brock, who takes off towards the waterwork with Croagunk loping easily at his heels. Dawn exchanges a look with Piplup. Then, together, they follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Giratina: _what_ are you _doing_  
>  hunter: following the plan  
> hunter: *run over at eighty miles an hour by a flaming unicorn*  
> hunter: im ok. (ouch)  
> Giratina: >:[  
>   
> i headcanon that any human language in the pokémon 'verse has at least three variations of “it”: for inanimate objects, for living creatures with no gender or a nonbinary gender, and for living creatures of unknown gender. the last two are used without negative connotation for both pokémon and humans.
> 
> you can also use the last one for people whose gender you do know, and it's not weird or rude. it's getting a bit dated, though. mostly only people above forty do it anymore, and younger people who grow up in rural areas still use it commonly but only for people they're especially close to, like Dawn does for Piplup and would for her mom if she had any reason to mention her mom this chapter. i can't fix English, but see if i don't fix the way everyone in the games and anime talk about their lifelong companions the same way they talk about tables.


	10. Ash

Following Darkrai is like following a shadow. Though it doesn't leave tracks, they can guess where it's headed, aided by how little it seems to care that it's being pursued.

Pikachu doesn't rile easily, but Darkrai's continued unwillingness to take it seriously is finally breaking through the barrier from curious to irritating. Ash spots the shadow sliding over an eave, points it out, and his starter's thunderbolt leaves a charred starburst on the building where it hits, then another on Darkrai's red collar while its lower half is still two-dimensional. Darkrai grunts and brings its hands together, charging a crackling blue shock wave.

Pikachu hisses, ears flat against its skull, and doesn't bother with getting out of the way. “What are you trying to do,” Ash wonders while his starter absorbs the attack. It doesn't want to fight them, and it's not afraid of them. There's no obvious pattern in the route it's taken, circling back and cornering itself in dead-end alleys and every once in a while inviting itself into someone's house, other than that it's gradually making its way towards the Space-Time Tower at the eastern edge of the town.

He's confirmed what Brock said about it knowing only a few words and phrases, but he still almost expects a response. He only earns the unchecked murderous fury that Darkrai's been giving off since Ash first saw it in the garden (that fits weirdly against how many people Darkrai hasn't murdered), though, and one of the glimpses of other concepts that it frequently mixes in. He doesn't know exactly what concept. Translating pokémon speech has long since become automatic, but he tries to suppress the habit for Darkrai.

He can get an impression of what a pokémon means, but to actually understand he needs to put words to it. It's something he's working on – he's gotten past that stage with Pikachu, and he's trying to reach the same level with Piplup, who's by far the easiest pokémon to understand among all those Ash has ever met. He's so proudly honest that it's impossible to misinterpret any of what he says. Darkrai isn't Pikachu or Piplup, though. Ash can't understand it directly. Which is a problem, because directly is the only way he ever could understand it – the things it says are so scrambled that words simply slide off when he tries to paste them in. In the garden, he got as far as _kill (possessive) going to kill nightmare not will die move bad dream gone hurt not hurt kill the leave_ before giving up with a headache and a deep-seated unease about the pokémon before him. He would still keep trying if it was useful, but he thinks it might take years of practice just to get anywhere close to parsing what Darkrai's saying.

A dozen illusory copies of Darkrai appear around Pikachu. Going by previous encounters, it's going to use them as a distraction for an escape. “We've got to stop it from running away,” Ash says. Sparks crackle on Pikachu's cheeks, and he braces himself as he orders, “Discharge!”

The entire backstreet lights up. The indiscriminate attack takes out the copies in an instant. The real Darkrai crosses its arms in front of itself as a shield. Ash is far enough away that he only catches a few glancing bolts, which sting a little before settling into a dull itch that he ignores – he picks up electric burns every couple of hours usually, and this has barely higher voltage than a thunder wave. Pikachu's only going for paralysis.

When the last bolts peter out and Ash shakes the spots out of his vision, he sees that it's watching Pikachu with a new focus, visible eye narrowed. Up until they ran into Brock, they were just trying to catch Darkrai's attention so Ash could talk to it. That's probably what gave it the impression that Pikachu's so weak it doesn't even warrant an attempt to put it to sleep. 

The rippling edges of its body haven't slowed; the paralysis didn't take. “Thunderbolt,” Ash says. The instant Pikachu begins setting up the path in the air that the charge will take, Darkrai darts to the side, dark void growing between its claws. Pikachu jumps out of the way of the thrown amorphous blob, trusting Ash behind it to do the same, already coating itself with the power from the canceled thunderbolt. As soon as its paws touch the ground, it hurtles at Darkrai fast enough that it looks to Ash like nothing but a streak of yellow-white light.

It slams into Darkrai's chest and bounces off, leaving the dark type reeling as electricity crawls across its body from the point of impact. Ash cheers, and Pikachu glances back to answer him with a bright cry. 

While Darkrai's still shuddering, struggling to adapt to the paralysis, Ash primes a fast ball and tosses it. Darkrai vanishes as light into the pokéball's maw. The ball drops to the ground with a _clang_ , shakes once, twice – Ash realizes suddenly that he doesn't have any idea whether fast balls work based on the pokémon's usual speed or if paralyzing a pokémon lowers the capture rate – and then the ball flies open and Darkrai reappears. 

Ash doesn't need to understand it to tell that it's not happy with them. Under its glare, he falters. This is the first time he's ever gone after a pokémon who didn't want to be caught. He didn't expect it feel so dirty. Reminding himself that he's doing it for Darkrai's sake doesn't scour away the guilt. A pokéball shouldn't be a cage.

In Kanto, all of history before the Indigo League is called the Lost Ages. City-states rose when refugees from destroyed lands flooded into nearby settlements and fell when a steelix had a bad day. A battle between charizard could set a meadow on fire, and the droves of fleeing pokémon could overrun a settlement, clearing out their crops and eating through their stored food. Settlements waged battles over the slightest resources and territory, and especially for the eggs and young of useful pokémon. Pokémon colonies were destroyed entirely by humans, the pokémon killed and the forests burned and the swamps filled in and the earth salted, for preying on humans or for existing uncomfortably close to a settlement. Knowledge was lost so often that three separate empires in central Kanto, each separated by about three hundred years from the one before, all independently discovered gravity.

Six hundred years ago, a warlord said _enough_ , and he issued an ultimatum: humanity would work together, with each other and with pokémon also, and those who refused would die alone. Through the bloodiest military campaign in Kanto that a surviving record exists of, Indigo and his four generals brought the region to heel under the iron fist of unity and friendship. They tried for diplomacy where they could, but the only state that surrendered without a fight was... either Cerulean or Celadon, Ash doesn't remember which. Anyway, Indigo's idea of diplomacy was to lay down the final terms up front and to declare war if someone suggested a wording change, which had exactly the results one would expect.

After the Unification, Indigo created the prototype of modern pokémon battling. His goal was always to create a new world where humans and pokémon wouldn't need to put their lives on the line to survive another day, and pokémon battling was definitely the purest expression of that wish. Ash recalls vaguely from elementary League history that historians argue about what his primary goal was, whether he did it more as a way to safely strengthen and train pokémon who could be used to better protect human settlements or if he did it mainly to improve human and pokémon relations. Ash doesn't know how heated the debate gets between historians, but he knows how bad it can be between trainers. When trainers talk about it, they don't bring up Indigo or the League. They don't need to. Their beliefs come across in how they treat their pokémon, and for people who are defined by their pokémon, that's all that matters. Catching an unwilling pokémon goes against everything Ash has stood for since the day Professor Oak handed him his trainer's license alongside the grumpy yellow rat who would become his best friend.

Ash brings out a standard pokéball, and Darkrai's gaze drops from his face to his hand. _“Stop,”_ it says, raising its claws in stuttering motions.

He judges the distance, imagines the arc of the throw, how much force to use. Then he tries to overlay the picture in his mind into reality. His arm doesn't move. Frowning, he rolls the ball back into his pocket. “There has to be another way.”

Pikachu suggests knocking it out and stashing it in a dumpster until things blow over, which startles a laugh out of him. “We're not all thugs, Pikachu. I've got a better idea.” He swings his backpack around and rummages through. Should be the third zipper down.... Darkrai sidles towards the wall, but a warning shock from Pikachu puts paid to that plan. Darkrai growls and charges up a dark pulse in its hands. “Won't be a second. Keep Darkrai here!” It's not the third zipper down. Pikachu calls an affirmative over the sound of a thunderbolt intercepting Darkrai's sleep-inducing attack. “Ignore that, it'll be a lot of seconds. Tell me we didn't run out....”

When was the last time he used one? The time with Pachirisu, that's right, and apparently he didn't put it in the usual place afterwards, so where would he have....

He touches lacquered wood at the same time as Pikachu and Darkrai both stop moving. Ash looks up. Pikachu has its head tilted, ears angled to catch sound. _People coming._ An ear twitches. _A lickilicky._

Alberto. Ash stares at Darkrai, feeling as if he's paralyzed instead. They can't let Alberto see it, but if they let it run away now, while it's debilitated, and someone else finds it before them – they can't let that happen either.

Darkrai takes Pikachu's stillness as a chance to sink into the ground. It seems like the paralysis applies to its shadow state, too; it's only reached the nearest wall's base by the time Ash's brain reboots and he says, “Hold it down!”

Pikachu sprints for it, penning it in with quick jolts, then leaps the last few feet and lands flat on its stomach atop the shadow, sprawled out to cover what little of Darkrai it can. A shock is enough to keep Darkrai still. Ash hurries over, picking up the broken fast ball as he goes and shoving it into a pocket, and Pikachu scoots aside to let him sit down, blocking more of the shadow from the view. “Sorry,” Ash says as he sets his backpack on the silhouette's head. Darkrai might not understand, but it lets him feel better.

They try to look nonchalant as Alberto's group turns the corner into view. Pikachu's cheeks let out sparks every couple of seconds to remind Darkrai of the threat. Ash hopes Darkrai doesn't call the bluff, because it's not a bluff. A lot of pokémon refuse to attack when their trainers are in the line of fire. A lot of pokémon are not Pikachu. 

Alberto's group stops to talk. Ash keeps expecting someone to mention how dark their shadow is, a normal shade while everything else in Alamos is muted, or the fact that it's moving, but the closest anyone gets is a question about whether they've noticed the melted popsicle they're sitting next to. The baron takes in the scorch marks scattered about, tells them not to try fighting Darkrai without backup, and then mentions the strange pokémon they've heard about that they're on their way to investigate. Meowth lags behind for a moment to ask if Pikachu's alright, what with the intermittent sparking, and accepts it when Ash answers that he's going to take Pikachu to the pokécenter to check it out. Nothing goes wrong at all.

Once they've gone, Pikachu climbs onto Ash's shoulder as he gets up. Darkrai peels off the ground after them and hovers in place, not making any move to attack or run. Its eye flicks in the direction the other trainers went, then back to Ash and Pikachu. There's a question in that. Darkrai probably doesn't expect anyone to answer, but Ash has never had a habit of following expectations. “There's something you're trying to do, right, Darkrai? You don't want to hurt anyone. You only fight when we force you to.” He holds out the small lacquered box, letting Darkrai watch him twist the lid off. Anyone with a pokémon who can produce spores or electricity learns quickly that cheri berries are as important to have on hand as food and water. He takes out a dried red berry, shows it to Darkrai, then pops it into his mouth without any hesitation, though he struggles not to make a face at the punishing spiciness. He finds a large clump of them stuck together and tosses the whole ball to Darkrai, who catches it out of the air. “They're just cheri berries,” he explains as Darkrai inspects the fruit. “It's for the paralysis.” 

Darkrai turns it between its claws for what feels like several minutes. Finally, it peels the individual berries apart and pushes all of them at once over its collar. Ash doesn't see any movement that might indicate chewing or swallowing or the existence of a mouth, but a second later its eye widens.

It's an interesting trait of pokémon that their tastes in food correspond to their natures. The most accurate sign of a major personality shift in a pokémon is a change in their food preference. Ash didn't know what it meant at the time, but he remembers perfectly the first time he saw Charizard, still a charmeleon back then, reject sweets, its old favorite, for bitter rawst berries it would rather have set on fire than eaten just a week earlier. These days he has the entire chart memorized thanks to osmosis from Brock. It doesn't surprise him that Darkrai enjoys cheri berries. He wonders how it feels about sour foods.

“Whatever you're doing, we can help,” he says. “Three people working together's gotta be better than going at it alone.”

Darkrai stares at him. _“Help.”_

“We'll help you,” Ash assures. He keeps his hands open at his sides so Darkrai can see his empty palms. It's generally good practice when interacting with a shy or wild pokémon to let them always know where your hands are. Since he's thrown an unwanted pokéball, he has even more reason to ensure he's transparent about his actions. 

_“Are you talking to me?”_

Ash looks over its shoulder, shocked that he's missed someone else standing behind it. It takes him a moment to realize the street's empty. Or, wait, what if there's a ghost or latias or something hovering invisibly – 

Pikachu catches his attention and asks for a translation. Slightly abashed that he forgot about that issue, Ash repeats what Darkrai said. Pokémon understand the meanings behind the words, not the sounds themselves. Since the meanings Darkrai projects are practically indecipherable, Pikachu only heard some nonsense noises in its head.

After a moment of thought and a considering look at Darkrai, Pikachu points out that it's probably not accustomed to “help” being said _to_ it. If most of the phrases it knows are along the lines of “stop” and “get out”, it might only know “help” from context like “Help! It's a darkrai!” 

Unfortunately, that makes much more sense than a surprise latias. “Yeah,” Ash says. “Yes, I'm talking to you, Darkrai. We're going to help you.”

Its gaze shifts, wary, to Pikachu, who does its best to look innocent and harmless despite being nothing remotely of the sort. Ash is pretty sure Darkrai doesn't buy it. _“Help me.”_

“Yes.”

 _“Yes,”_ it echoes. It clenches and opens a fist easily, no lingering traces of paralysis remaining. Then it turns away, scanning their surroundings until it spots something that catches its eye. It drifts over and says, _“Look.”_

It's pointing at a doormat.

“Huh?” says Ash.

 _“Look,”_ it says again, insistent. Its claw moves, tracing the shape of the first letter into the air. The mat reads _WELCOME_. If it can't talk, then it definitely can't read. It likely doesn't know that the colored shapes in the straw mean anything at all.

Shapes. That's all it sees when it looks at words. It's showing them the shapes of the letters. Which means it's... um....

“Pika?” Pikachu asks, just as lost.

The only things Ash can think of that are shaped like letters are – wait. _Wait._

“Pikachu,” he breathes, “buddy, you remember Molly, don't you?”

Pikachu looks at him, expression utterly blank. Then it blinks. Looks at Darkrai. Looks at the doormat. Looks at Darkrai. Looks at the doormat. “ _Chu_ ,” it swears. Ash flicks the side of its head.

While they were traveling the Johto gym circuit, they met a girl, Molly Hale, who accidentally allowed a whole host of unown to bind themselves to her. It was an ugly situation. Molly has a good heart and Ash genuinely likes her, but he doesn't enjoy remembering what happened in Greenfield. The power to freely manipulate reality isn't something he would trust anyone with, even a little girl who only wanted her parents back. There were far, far too many close calls. Professor Oak was quietly ecstatic about it once everything was resolved, though. Before that incident, about all anyone could say with certainty about the alphabet-shaped pokémon species was that they exist sometimes and that they don't really seem to do much with that existence. Finding out that they can manifest any wish into the physical world when they're gathered in enough numbers was utterly unexpected, to put it mildly. Way, way, way too mildly. They didn't have any limits to their power as far as Ash could tell. Compared to Greenfield, Alamos is as tame as it gets. A spot of fog? Some ghostly apparitions? The unown in Greenfield created _a second Entei_. “You're looking for unown,” Ash says. Everyone else in Alamos has been going after completely the wrong pokémon. “We got it. We understand. We'll help you.”

Almost hesitantly, Darkrai sinks into the ground. The shadow starts down the street, gliding at a slower pace than Ash knows it usually takes. Ash jogs after it before it can decide to change its mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for those few of you who don't have your pokémon nature chart memorized (casuls): Charizard started off in life naive and adorable, then dragon puberty hit and turned him sassy and not adorable. Ash thinks Darkrai might be lonely, though the full list of natures that like spicy food is lonely, adamant, brave, and naughty.
> 
> the Greenfield incident happens in the third movie, _Spell of the Unown_. it's pretty good, and not only by the standards of Pokémon films. if you only ever watch one Pokémon movie, i'd absolutely recommend that one.


	11. The Old Hunter

As soon as you cross into Giratina's domain, the young man you're relocating stops struggling, transfixed by the god looming above. It must be a sight. The first time you witnessed a Great One in person had... an impact. One quite aside from the fists he crushed you into the dust with while you were still reeling. You can't imagine it being different for anyone else. The moment stands as the marker of when you realized the meaning in the spider's words, when you began on some level to understand the sheer, far-reaching _scale_ of the tragedy in Yharnam – and it _was_ tragedy, for all that its actors went to such horrific efforts to present it as malice. Amygdala was exactly as you imagined the gods to be. In the same thought, though, he was both more and far, far less. In a different time, a different life, you might have worshiped him. But you could never have respected him, and killing his vessel was no more sacrilege than watching a mountain fall.

In comparison, Giratina makes for a splendid first impression. Let him look his fill. All the better if doing so keeps him occupied from trying to get away from you. He can't deliberately aggravate your injuries through the padded leather, but carrying a one hundred and forty pound weight in your condition makes it feel like you're breathing through ice shards even when the aforementioned weight isn't moving. If he withstood a nightmare, a limited amount of direct exposure to a god's presence won't push him over the edge.

Wordlessly, Giratina looks away and opens another portal. Your abductee says something short and breathless, then remembers he was trying to escape. You oblige him. He lands on the cobbles with a muffled _whump_ and a less muffled exclamation that has you pressing a hand to your ear, tilting your head into it so you don't need to try raising your elbow past shoulder height. Not that it helps. Makes it worse, really. The veins in your hand are so much extra noise. You wish half-heartedly that your eardrums were fully ruptured. You would be off balance and mostly deaf, but you'd almost prefer that. A Call Beyond did more damage to your hearing than it did the horse, and then you resorted to the tiny tonitrus afterwards – neither can claim the title of the most acoustically subtle tool.

Stars, you've met cleric beasts that weren't as loud as that bird. If Giratina screams right now, you might actually kill yourself.

You haul him up more roughly than necessary in a movement that is in all likelihood significantly more painful for you than him. He makes a sound in protest that you ignore aside from a grimace, and you snag his wrist before he can reach his belt. The child with the larger bird summoned another of the not-Kin (you need to come up with a better label for them, too) after the first went down, so you know the people here aren't limited to one summon. Which is absurd, but you're not here to question it.

He tries for the summoning devices with his other hand. You make to knock his hand away – but no, look at how uncharitable you're being. You're in pain; there's no reason that should translate into pettiness. You let go, let him scramble away from you and summon someone small, scaled and bipedal, as well as two... bats, it seems like. Who, in the manner of bats, start shrilling as soon as they appear. They're not loud, at least. High-pitched, but not loud. Small mercies.

You aren't required to bear it for long. Giratina sweeps the lot of them into the outward portal with a tentacle. It looks at you and asks, soundlessly, if that was what you were trying for.

There's more to the question, of course. Giratina is kind enough to wait for you to understand. It's not an easy process to sift through the word's layers, split them into digestible pieces, and rebuild them back into something interconnected and coherent, particularly not when you lose your progress after discovering you were wrong about it being a question. (Well, not entirely. There's something in there along the lines of _you were spitting blood, do you need help?_ Nice of it to ask first this time.) It's going to be like that, is it? You would sigh if your ribs could take it.

Giratina figured out quickly what you were trying to do. Remarkably quickly. You're impressed. You doubt you would have been able to figure out what you were doing in as narrow a time frame.

Which meant that it had more time in which to... worry? Be concerned? No, something stronger – it was afraid. Because it thought you wouldn't be able to accomplish the task it'd set... but that's wrong, too. Rather, it was afraid for you in particular _._ Your life. Your safety. You _scared_ it.

That's.... The moon presence isn't as invested in you as that. You make a show of eyeing the god. 

It genuinely thought you might die. It considers you to be fairly skilled at combat, but also that said skill barely compensates for how weak you are physically. Flattering as that is, it's perfectly accurate. You're not much more durable than a regular person. Considerably faster, of course, and your body is constantly resetting towards the state you were in after the moon presence remade you, meaning you can walk off any injury that doesn't kill you on the spot, but you're practically a civilian in most respects. You truly would have died if the unicorn had succeeded in striking you full on.

You're the exception to the rule. Hunters, even those like you who haven't availed themselves of the doll's services, tend to be juggernauts to the level of surviving direct cannon fire and cleaving a body apart with one slash of a saw. It's a natural consequence of imbibing so much beast blood. Vital, too, more or less, considering the conditions on the hunt. Cannon fire is the least of a hunter's worries. You never had quite that much power at your disposal, what with having only participated in a single hunt, but earlier in the night you would have been able to take the unicorn's charge as long as you steered his horn away from anything truly important. It would have hurt, but you'd have gotten up afterwards. And you were only a recently inducted hunter then. The old guard were the terrifying ones.

But you've experience with making do. You wouldn't die to someone who wasn't actually trying to off you, at least, and none of the creatures in the town were intentionally using lethal force. Cultural difference, you expect. Conflicting expectations of what constitutes lethal. And that doesn't answer the question, either, of why Giratina cares. What are you to it?

Before you have time to delve further into the word, the first of the townspeople comes through. Their attention flits only briefly over you. Giratina is far more eye-catching. The god looks away from you, and the local – you're sure they do something, but you've less idea what. There's not much sound. Oh, but there wouldn't be, would there, if they're sticking their head back through the portal to check that it's not a one-way street.

Another follows, exclaiming as she drops down, as well as two of the creatures who aren't Kin, the ice bird and the amphibian. Someone else follows on their heels. You can make out the general shape of the newcomer the same way you can the ice bird's kin, but everything past that is foggy, hidden away in another dream.

It's not a state that lasts for long. The fog quickly dissipates, taking your awareness of them with it, but a human's voice sounds from the same space the creature occupied, relieved and astonished. Meanwhile, the boy, dripping wet and smelling of lake water and something else, returns along with the bats through the outward portal, presumably spots the other townspeople, and starts shouting at them. You bite your tongue lightly. Must he really?

You step out from between the two groups, more to get out from in front of his voice than anything, and Giratina arcs over the path to hover in the void at your back, placing you as a medium between itself and the locals. Also placing it behind you, but that would only concern you if it came from a mortal or if you were fighting Giratina. Great Ones don't make threat displays.

The movements catch their attention. The boy falters, but after a moment a man from the group that followed him through the portal calls out to him. Most of them are watching you. It's entirely unnecessary; your part in this is done. Hopefully they'll be able to reason that out. If not... well, you wouldn't mind another conflict, really. Pointless as it would be. You're injured enough that your movements are restricted, but you also have a better conception of how little you need to hold back. You learned much more about the locals from the one fight than you would have otherwise.

Which is pathetic, of course, but it is how it is. You haven't needed to know how to interact with people nonviolently since you took up Gehrman's mantle. You're a little out of practice. No point to trying to get back in practice, either.

The man who was trapped in a different dream speaks loudly. No one else moves and his gaze is on you, so you assume it's directed your way. You face him out of politeness, but, even if you knew what he was saying, that's the only response you can offer. After a bit, he looks away and calls to the boy with the unicorn, who says something back and hesitantly begins to make his way over, the two bats following above him.

He has to pass in front of you to reach the others. He stops before then, wary with good reason, but there's no going around it. You can't move any farther back – you're already uncomfortably close to the edge of the island. 

With him nearer, the unfamiliar smell clinging to him nags at you. It's strong, as strong as the scent of the water. That shouldn't be the case. You're fairly sure the portal opens into a lake and he was fully submerged. What could compare to that? It puts you in mind of starlight, somewhat, but less distant, less cold....

Put like that, there's not much it might be.

You're the one who wants more space between you now. The moon presence is generally lenient with your misdemeanors, but there are lines you don't dare cross. If she catches sunlight on you, even the lingering traces of another world's sun shed by someone else, she'll eat you alive. 

While you're distracted, a bat breaks rank to flutter towards you and shrieks high enough to shatter glass.

You fall into the half-asleep state of quickening on reflex. For a moment, the sound is wonderfully muffled. But there's no room to go back, so you surge forwards, meaning that when you pull yourself into waking she's blasting the unholy racket practically right into your ears. You reach for her, pushing past the pain that sears through your chest when you raise your arm. You almost grab her, but she flits out of the way just in time, still shrilling, and tries to sink her fangs into the back of your hand, though your glove stops her. Her mouth is blocked off and the sound should stop, except the other bat's already picked up her slack.

You're not sure how it happens, but there's stone under your knees and you're gripping the ground like a lifeline. You can tell where Giratina is, the bats, the ice bird and the amphibian, a few of the others you fought who've followed through the portal, and the humans you can guess at from the general direction their attention is coming from. All of it should be enough to orient you. That _noise_ , though _–_ you know it's the bats who are making it, and you know where the bats are, but the sound's bouncing at nearly equal frequency off of everything in range, making it seem like it's coming from a dozen different sources. You've relied on hearing as your primary sense for so long; even aware that it's throwing you off, you can't simply ignore it at will.

Giratina intervenes, looming and curling a tentacle in front of you to cut you off from the floating island's other occupants. Then it screams from right above you.

Ow.

Aside from an omnipresent, deafening drone, everything's quiet afterwards. Relatively speaking. You attempt to rise, but your foot slips when the ground pitches and you barely catch yourself from toppling over. Your ears are bleeding.

In the time you've been host, technology has advanced in the waking world. Not that it's affected hunters as much as you suspect it has civilians. Fighting styles have changed since Yharnam – unlike the hunters you knew, the fools you've had to wake up have no unified approach to combat other than the single commonality of hunting in small groups – but that's entirely due to the lack of Gehrman. When it comes to hunting, one sharp piece of metal is as good as another, and trick weapons have the benefit of counting as two sharp pieces of metal. Or one sharp piece of metal and a very large rock. Or – well, the point is that the designs are efficient enough already that it'd be difficult to improve on them. Plenty of hunters don't use trick weapons anymore for some reason, but even those hunters use weapons traditional enough for you to recognize, swords and machetes and long knives and the like.

On the other hand, ranged options have gone through significant improvements. Modern guns' reach, speed, and rate of fire eclipse every firearm in your arsenal. You've finally gotten over your inexplicable attachment to the old models and have started to work on switching over, but the timing has been difficult to relearn. There's also a much wider variety of bombs available. Molotovs remain prevalent, likely due to how reliable and simple to make they are, but the hunters backed by certain factions also carry fun little metal canisters that blow up on a timer after pulling a pin. Or before pulling the pin. Or not at all. Or whenever the stars decide to align. Like you said: fun. Until you figure out how to tack safety features onto the ones you've commandeered, you'll stick to your cocktails. The future can keep its fancy gadgets and suicidal optimism.

Although you don't deny the bombs' efficacy when they work properly. Their manufacturers are creative with their effects, too, allowing for usage in nearly any situation. The conventional shrapnel or concussive ones easily carry enough force to tear through a body. The ones that expel various gases likely make for extremely useful distractions when employed against nearly anyone other than you.

Then there are the bombs designed to stun, not cause damage. The outer casing remains intact when they blow up, containing the force of the explosion within while still letting the sound of it out. Luckily, the explosion doesn't linger for so long that you can't quicken through the entire duration. You weren't aware of that the first time you got hit with one of the things, though. You thought it was a shrapnel or concussive bomb and simply moved out of what you expected to be its range, which you only learned some seconds later was not the best course of action to take. The noise all but knocked you out cold. If you hadn't killed the last hunter from that group of dreamers in the space between its being thrown and its going off, he would have easily killed you while you were incapacitated.

Which is all to say that you're perfectly aware of your susceptibility to loud noises, and, like for every other form of attack, your solution to the problem is to not be there at the same time as it is. That is your only solution. You have no contingency plans for failure. You don't exactly expect the opportunity to fail more than once.

You don't exactly expect to be taken out by friendly fire, either. You really should, with your track record – Patches, Alfred, the doll, Gehrman, the moon presence – but it continues to be a delightful surprise every time.

You wouldn't normally count on the Great One who's sponsoring you to keep you safe while you're injured, but Giratina hasn't moved the tentacle, and the last word it screeched painted its intentions clearly. It's honestly irritated with them for attacking you out of the blue, and it will knock out every not-Kin present unless they stop.

(Knock out, not kill. It's an important distinction to note. The Great Ones are sympathetic in spirit, which doesn't always work out to quite the same thing as being sympathetic in practice. You've yet to know Giratina to harbor lethal intent for anyone outside of Arceus, but it's surprising nonetheless to hear that articulated in such concrete terms.)

You also don't have much choice. Until you heal, which will take longer with you being awake, you'll be utterly useless. You can't even stand. Unsteadily, you slide your weight off your knees and sit, peg leg under you and actual foot in front, your elbow crooked over the raised knee. Might as well get comfortable considering you won't be moving from here until the ground agrees to stay put.


	12. Croagunk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> explanations! (also, rapidash guy is indeed a random oc)
> 
> three or four more updates until the conclusion of the movie, i think.

Croagunk's trainer hasn't been under the water for five seconds before his head pops back up. Then his shoulders, his arms, and most of his torso as he grabs the fountain's rim and leverages himself halfway out. Croagunk wonders if he should give him a hand. The pokémon brings said hand forward to look at. It has three fingers, no grasping ability, and a film of slick and variably toxic slime.

Brock is scared, but only a little. Mostly, he's the blankness that means confusion. There's no way for Croagunk to accurately guess how to react to that. Croagunk can wait until Brock tells him what to do.

Brock holds himself there. It looks precarious. If the opening shuts on him like that, it might cut him in half. Maybe. And he can't see the part of himself on the other side. But Brock tends to know what he's doing, so Croagunk doesn't worry.

“It's a two-way portal,” Alberto says, relief and tension mixed together. He arrived after the fight, but he's not late. It is an ongoing situation. The lickilicky leans over Brock, who takes the swinging tongue to the face like a champ, to peer down. The portal's opaque, though. It looks like a thick oil slick. Blurry, formless shadows move in its depths. “What is it? What's inside?”

Brock leans back from him. “There's a large pokémon,” he says, clipped with urgency. Speaking puts his thoughts in order. The confusion chips at the edges.

“Is it the spirit world?” Dawn asks.

Piplup falls onto his rump, eyes widening and flippers slapping over his beak as he squeaks a frantic denial.

Croagunk agrees. That would be a problem. Croagunk is very much not equipped to deal with spirits. Nobody on any of their trainers' teams is equipped to deal with spirits. This is why it's useful that Alberto is here now. Croagunk doesn't understand why people listen to him – he doesn't have any exceptional qualities to set him apart from them as far as Croagunk can tell – but they do, and so he has many trainers with him, crowding around the fountain alongside the people who participated in the fight or working on bringing the rapidash back to consciousness. Numbers can get in the way, but they're good for managing unknown situations.

Croagunk would prefer to claim that. None of the other pokémon outside their balls are eager about the prospect of venturing into the spirit world either, though, so in this case they might not be good for anything.

Brock answers with only a trace of doubt, “It isn't. I've never seen anything like this place before.” He cracks something of a smile. “I haven't been attacked since I started talking. Some of you should be able to come through.” He lets go and vanishes into the water without a ripple. Dawn immediately vaults the basin, Piplup flapping at her heels, and Croagunk, with no better option in mind, climbs up and slides in after them.

The first he hears on the other side is Dawn's raised voice: “ – is _that_?” It doesn't surprise Brock, so Croagunk sets it aside in favor of getting his bearings. He doesn't know what he expected, but cobbles identical to the ones he left behind were not it. Paved roads are a human thing. Croagunk treads over to Brock, incidentally moving out of the way of the entrance as Alberto comes bouncing through. The lickilicky might have told the rest to stay put, because no one else follows.

Dawn might be referring to any number of phenomena. The skyless void. The islands floating in it, fragments broken off from greater wholes – over there an upside-down island serving as the foundation of two houses, a thick, twining water pipe connecting it to the next one over that holds only a storefront without a structure. The second portal on the other end of the island they're on, which consists of only a pathway. The creature that the trainers think is a pokémon standing in the way between them and the other portal. The blatantly poisonous purple cloud drifting by beneath them. Croagunk has no idea. He follows her line of sight to the structure suspended over the path. It's grey aside from the red and black bands across its elongated form and the jagged yellow adornments primarily focused on one end. Six shadowy streamers that end in crimson spikes extend from the side not facing them. It's an oddball, but not especially so compared to the surroundings. He checks for Piplup's thoughts on the matter. Dawn's pokémon echoes her shock and adds defensiveness to the mix, planting himself in front of his trainer with flippers spread, but he's no more sure of the reason for it than Croagunk is.

Alberto cries out. Croagunk turns, raising his arms, but Alberto's dismay morphs quickly into delight. He's shrinking. His return to humanity is like an evolution in reverse. It ends before Croagunk has the time to find the idea unsettling, and a grinning Alberto rubs his clothes between his fingers. “I'm back to normal! I'm not dreaming, am I? It must be because we are no longer in Alamos.”

That's a reasonable assumption on multiple levels. But Brock's skeptical. Croagunk revises his assessment to take it with a grain of salt.

“It looks familiar,” Alberto says, holding his chin. He, too, is looking at the structure. As is Brock. Croagunk's missing something. He thinks the portals and the location and the pokémon who toyed with them at the square should be more pressing, but he's the only one who does. “I do feel like I've seen it somewhere.”

They're interrupted by a shout from the direction of the other portal. “Hey, you! This leads outside!” It's the rapidash's trainer, very confused and a little hopeful, dripping wet, and accompanied by a pair of zubat. Croagunk is not sure how that turn of events came about or what it means, but it's highly amusing. He chuckles. This concerns Dawn and Alberto, which is also funny.

Trepidation surges through Brock as soon as he spots the zubat. Croagunk doesn't know what that's about, but he turns a careful eye on the bats. It quickly becomes obvious. They're agitated, and getting more so. They're resonating off of each other. The rapidash mirrored his trainer, so it's not that the human is bad. Either they're recently caught or he doesn't care for his zubat half as much as he does for the rapidash. That's possible. The rapidash is his starter, and there's no competing with a starter for a trainer's attention. But Croagunk gives him the benefit of the doubt.

Besides, it's typical zubat behavior. They can't wall themselves off if their lives depend on it. A lone zubat will stop and think. A pair of zubat will attack a pikachu who they just heard fry an onix. It's not always silly – zubat flocks past a dozen or so terrify even Pikachu, though admittedly he does have very good hearing – but it usually is.

Then Brock's dread quells. Croagunk glances at him, follows his line of sight to the trainer, and... doesn't see anything that explains why. Croagunk defaults to trusting Brock, but this is fishy. The zubat haven't exactly stopped feeding each other over the past second.

He tries to see them as Brock does.

They flutter close to their trainer. That is all. They don't have eyes or noses or, really, faces, which humans use to read intent. Neither do they show other signals, every part of their compact bodies engaged in keeping them aloft. They look like normal zubat. They don't look scared and worried and upset.

Croagunk considers telling someone. But there are bigger things to worry about. He'll keep a watch on them. That should be fine. He hunches into a crouch, gaze glued to the zubat.

“But like,” the rapidash's trainer calls, gesturing widely, “you know how Alamos Town is on top of a plateau in the middle of a lake? Not anymore! It's gone! It's like something just sliced the rock – ”

The pokémon that brought the trainer to this place makes its first move since Croagunk came through. The trainer breaks off mid-sentence as the pokémon backs precariously close to the edge of the path, leaving the way between the portals clear. As clear as it can without jumping off, at least. It's still _there_. Shifting a few feet over doesn't make it less capable of fighting. But Croagunk thinks he gets the message.

Then the structure the humans have been paying so much attention to moves as well. It arcs overhead, dives, and coils in the empty space beside the path, arching its neck to peer down at the pokémon in front of it. It has eyes. They're red and black and set deep into its head. Croagunk didn't see them before. He gives himself a moment to watch it curiously before looking back towards the zubat. Is it a pokémon too? Since it's not a human, it must be.

Brock is equal parts wary and fascinated, that sharp interest particular to when he sees a pokémon act in a way he doesn't expect and wants to investigate further. Dawn is straight-up wary, Piplup at her feet puffing up and glaring narrowly at the large pokémon – it _is_ very large, Croagunk notices for the first time. Alberto, meanwhile, runs through a gamut of emotions. Coming from Croagunk's trainer and his trainer's companions, that would mean they've seen something they want and are coming up with a laughably unfeasible and embarrassing plan to obtain it. Brock does it whenever he spots an attractive woman; Ash and Dawn reserve it for pokémon, gym badges, worthy rivals, and contest prizes. But trainers are a different breed of human than the rest. They have ambition. Non-trainers, in contrast, think up practical plans.

Alberto is not a trainer. Croagunk doesn't expect anything particularly interesting out of him. Alberto focuses on the smaller of the two unknowns – the bias non-trainers have for physically human-like pokémon, expecting them to be smarter and more willing to converse. “Hello!” The pokémon turns to him. The pokémon doesn't have eyes. The only reason it has to face him is so it can save itself some time aiming if things come to a fight. Alberto recognizes that, if Croagunk's guessing correctly the reason for the caution furrowing his brow, and Croagunk counts himself surprised. He thought Alberto would perceive it as the pokémon following the rules of human interaction. “Pokémon, did you bring him to this place to show him a way out?”

It's not going to respond.

Dawn says, quiet, “Isn't it going to answer?”

Piplup does a full-body equivalent of a shrug, chirping noncommittally. Croagunk glances at Brock and waits until he catches his trainer's eye before returning to the zubat. Brock asks him, “Can you talk to it?”

Croagunk puffs out his cheeks, slowly deflates them, and makes no attempt to contact it. He doesn't get embarrassed, exactly, but he's not one for pointlessly making a spectacle. He's not going to try to talk at the equivalent of a brick wall.

Alberto shouts to the rapidash's trainer, “I believe it's leaving the way open! Try to come over here!”

“Seriously?” the trainer yells, jabbing frantically at the floating pokémon. He throws up his hands, nearly hitting one of his zubat. They're definitely recent additions to his team. “Fine! Only because Destroyer's still over there!”

Dawn chokes and starts coughing.

“Hey, Destroyer's a _great_ name!” He begins to cross towards them, he and his zubat all growing steadily more tense as they near the pair at the center of the island. “It's punny! Destroyer, destrier! I was four! You're laughing at a four year old!” He falls silent, slowing, and stops entirely before he reaches the two pokémon. The humanoid one shuffles even farther back, stopping only when it has what must be half its foot hanging over open air. (Now that it's only standing, its clothes reach nearly the ground and hide its old injury, but during the fight Croagunk caught a clear glimpse of the wood prosthetic. Its fighting ability would already be unusual, yet it managed all that while missing a foot. Croagunk wants to know where it learned to battle. Again, though: asking a brick wall.)

The movement is too much for one of the zubat. Croagunk grumbles a warning and runs forwards just before the zubat blasts a supersonic at the pokémon.

The fight ends before he reaches it. The other zubat follows his teammate's lead, the strange pokémon stumbles and falls and barely keeps itself from introducing its face to the ground, and then the large pokémon rears. Screams.

Croagunk has never heard a cry like it. It stretches on and on, its corpse lingering in the spaces between heartbeats long after the pokémon's mandibles snap together again. When it finally makes to die, it peels away in layers. First goes the sound that from another creature would be the entire scream. Afterwards, the dual-toned echo as if the pokémon has two throats working out of time with each other, the _actual_ echo (though what creates it in so much empty space is a mystery), and the underlying rasp that suggests old damage. Then only the memory of the sound, the truth and the core of it after its material trappings have been shed, survives. It won't allow itself to be forgotten.

Croagunk doesn't object to remembering it. As long as it doesn't do anything else while it's in his mind.

Both zubat reel. The noise ringing through his ears and skull and bones doesn't stop Croagunk, though the shuddering of his rib cage robs his breath, but the spike-tipped shadow lashing down in front of him forces him to a halt. It's wider than he is tall. He can't see the path beyond it. He hears the trainer shouting, a stream of guilt-riddled cursing, and calling his zubat back into their balls.

The pokémon lifts higher, head over the path. Croagunk stands his ground and meets the one eye visible from his angle. Behind him comes the sound of pokéballs releasing. Pachirisu and Buizel materialize combat-ready on either side of Piplup. The pokémon ignores them to tilt its head slightly towards Croagunk, mandibles parting. The mouth open behind them is pink-tongued and real and alive. It doesn't fit on an object that doesn't have a mind, but whatever. Croagunk won't get hung up over something that irrelevant.

Alberto's taken a few steps forwards. “If I had Lickilicky – ”

“Everyone stand down,” says Brock, loud enough to carry but absent of the forcefulness of a shout. It's a skill a trainer learns when he wants to keep his voice while having a starter pokémon who is a partially deaf steelix capable of encircling a small building without stretching.

“But – ” Dawn begins. Piplup squawks a challenge at the pokémon whose pupil is the same size as him. The pokémon doesn't notice or doesn't care.

“It's only a miscommunication. Trainer, did you recall your pokémon?”

“Definitely! Yes!” His voice goes shrill and backs away as the pokémon turns away from Croagunk. “I've had them for three weeks, I didn't think they would do that!”

“Is the portal still open?” Brock says, frowning. He palms Croagunk's pokéball, but he doesn't move to recall him. He's considering it, though.

“Yeah, it's here!”

Then everyone quiets as the large pokémon closes its mouth and draws back. Its gaze turns briefly to Croagunk and then Brock's group. The tentacle curls. The limb doesn't leave the island, still hiding the other pokémon from sight, but half the path is open again around it. Croagunk sees that the trainer's retreated nearly to the portal.

For a moment, no one, not even Brock, knows what to do. He's thinking it over still when the other trainer throws up his hands, swears, and sprints towards them. 

Croagunk tenses. He's not the only one who does. But the pokémon only tracks the trainer's progress with its head, even when he passes close enough that he could reach out and touch its limb, and not a few seconds later he stops behind Croagunk, panting too heavily for the distance he just crossed.

Dawn, pale but steady, puts a hand on his shoulder. “Let's get back,” she says to the others.

“Yes,” Alberto says, eyeing the pokémon with wary calculation. “We can discuss what to do from back in Alamos. Even if it means I will become Lickilicky again. You can tell us exactly what you saw on the other side of the portal.”

They climb out one by one. The pokémon only watches from where it is, and Brock, at the very least, has lost all but the barest traces of his fear towards it by the time he recalls Croagunk.


	13. Pikachu

“So, we haven't found any unown,” Ash summarizes, and yawns. From his shoulder, Pikachu reaches up and pats his cap.

They're crouched in the storm drains together, Pikachu and Ash and a wanted pokémon well on its way to becoming their newest best friend whether it knows that or not. Ash is nearly dead on his feet. Nothing about this is surprising.

Musty light falls through the grate above, filling in a barred rectangle on the walkway near Ash's feet. Footsteps and wheels set it clanking as they pass over, and raised voices stream through to echo oddly against the water.

There's an evacuation in progress. Someone found a way past the fog barrier. Darkrai's victims were the first to be returned to daylight. Evidently, taking them out of town breaks Darkrai's hold on them. The trio haven't run into one of the illusory pokémon since the pokécenter was emptied. Sudowoodo should be alright.

Since then, the rest of the town's occupants have been packing their possessions and making their slow but steady way out. Movement! Bustle! People don't feel as sludgy when they have a goal to work towards, especially when there are so many others doing the same alongside them. For the most part, taking action's helping. But the goal is to abandon their homes, and there's worry there, too – fear, even – that this won't be temporary. It's a rich, heavy mix.

“ _Yes,”_ Darkrai says. Noise without meaning. Not even the garbled meaning of a dark type, because in its shadow state Darkrai hides itself almost completely. Now that they're not fighting, Pikachu's continuously fascinated by the concept. _Yes_ is a word that Pikachu understands, which makes it all the stranger. He recognizes the arrangement of the sounds, knows the meaning that should be associated with it, but the meaning isn't there and yet he can still fill in what Darkrai said. It's exactly the way most humans talk. Stream-lined. Clear-cut. There's a simplicity to the idea that appeals to him. If it's only the sounds that carry meaning, they can talk over long distances through phones and video without losing information, and they can write. It's how humans lie to each other so easily and so often, too. For pokémon, lying well through speech requires practice to hone thought-quick reflexes and mental discipline. Though it came much more readily once he got the knack of it, it took Pikachu years to learn his first and simplest lie: _You don't scare me._ Humans just need to move their tongues a bit. Having first-hand experience of how it all works is new and exciting.

He wouldn't want it as the only form of communication, though. Interesting as it is, it exists by necessity. The fact is that everyone, humans and pokémon, talks constantly. For pokémon, the vocalizations are merely emphasis. But humans can't feel, so they design entire languages out of what amounts to a punctuation. In the spaces where a pokémon finds intent, humans hear silence. Pikachu never had a friend before Ash, but even he finds the idea of ever being so unbearably isolated humbling. He's so, so glad for his partner that Ash has begun to learn.

Ash stands slowly, fighting gravity every bit of the way. “We should scour the town again. We must have missed someplace. Where should we start? How about – ”

Pikachu tucks his head under Ash's chin and pushes up, closing his mouth. Nope. They can't go out now, not with so many people everywhere. Only one pair of eyes needs to notice their shadow. They should just take a nap while they wait for the town to clear out. Ash is tired. Pikachu is tired. Darkrai doesn't seem tired, but you never know.

Ash nudges him away with his knuckles, avoiding Pikachu's cheek as he always does. “I'm not – ” He swallows a yawn. “'m fine. Unown get stronger the more time they have to work. We need to find them before things get worse.”

That's true. What's also true is that if Ash faints and falls into the reeking water, his clothes and maybe his pack are going to soak through.

Ash wavers, but holds. “Piiii,” Pikachu whines, pressing against his neck.

“Come on, we have priorities!” Ash insists. Pikachu is extraordinarily unimpressed. Ash grins. “Sleep is for the dead. If you're tired, I can carry you in the bag.”

Pikachu buries his face in Ash's jacket in exasperation. The rank tang of the air down here drowns under his partner's scent. He lets his twitching ears betray him, though, and Ash only laughs and scratches Pikachu's head. “Let's keep going through here until we find some place with no people where we can head back up.”

They end up coming out of a manhole by the tower, at a long unbroken street bordered on one side by the park and the other by buildings. Pikachu exits first, shoving the heavy plate out of the way and crawling out after it like this is a perfectly normal thing to be doing. He trots a few feet away, checking idly about for people. They're far out at the edge of town while everyone else is gathering at the exit deeper in, so they're not likely to find anyone. He's right, as expected. The closest signs of people he hears are the flashes of pokéballs from deeper in the park as trainers and volunteers capture water-confined pokémon from the ponds. When he's confirmed they're alone, he drops the nonchalant act, scurries back to the hole in the street, and shouts down.

His partner sits on the ground as soon as he clears the edge, trying very hard not to pant from the simple climb. Pikachu nudges his leg, worrying, but of course Ash pretends he doesn't notice. Once Ash recovers, he dries his feet on the ground, unties the shoes and socks hanging by the laces from his belt, and pulls his footwear back on. Darkrai speaks as he's finishing, and Ash translates for Pikachu. _“They left.”_

“They?” Ash asks. “Who's they?”

“ _Everyone.”_

“Everyone...?” Ash's mind is a fog, hazy and heavy. That's alright. That's what partners are for. Pikachu chatters for his attention and tells him what he's pretty sure Darkrai means. Ash's expression clears. “Yeah, the townspeople are evacuating. Leaving.”

“ _Cresselia?”_ That's the pokémon meant to be the counterpart to darkrai. Pikachu makes a questioning sound. Did she open up the exit? But if the fog isn't Darkrai's doing, why would it expect – _“Will they come back?”_

The haze thins at the edges. With energy he tries hard to feel, Ash says, “This is their home. They're not going to abandon it.” Then: “Do you want them to come back, Darkrai?”

It doesn't respond immediately. Pikachu and Ash exchange glances, both of them with questions the other can't answer. Finally, Darkrai says, _“The garden belongs to everyone.”_

Then their shadow peels away, and Ash scrambles to his feet to follow.

Technically, Pikachu has gone without sleep as long as Ash has, but he still has charge remaining. It leaks persistently while he's awake, but he has enough control over his electricity to minimize the loss. He hasn't used it actively either aside from the barely notable amounts he aimed at Darkrai. As long as he's careful, he can pull off another couple days without rest, though he would prefer not to. Unless he finds a power source, in which case he can stay awake without effort for as long as it lasts.

Pikachu is not altogether sure why humans and other non-electric types sleep. The easiest way for him to imagine it is that they do charge when they rest and bleed when they're awake. They have electricity, after all, even if it's not much and nothing they can voluntarily use. That probably isn't the reason for it, but it's how he thinks of it. The results are the same either way. They grow tired as the hours pass, and it happens faster if they're active. The younger, less experienced ones have less energy and less practice at using it efficiently, so they charge more often. And nearly all of them require more sleep than Pikachu because they don't store nearly as much electricity as him.

Though Ash breaks the mold in so many other ways, in this he's the same as the rest of his line. Darkrai moves no faster than it did before, but the gap between them still widens. Pikachu clings to his shoulder and rubs cheeks with him, transferring static. “Ow,” says Ash without heat. He doesn't stop Pikachu.

“Where are we going?” he asks after a while. Darkrai has pulled nearly half a block ahead and doesn't answer. (It's begun to slow. Pikachu wondered if it would shake them off when they couldn't keep up; he's glad that's not the case. Chasing it down again would be a hassle when it has that much of a head start.) Pikachu has no useful information to offer other than the obvious: that they're heading straight to the tower. Darkrai understands a lot more about the situation than it can tell them, so Pikachu's not inclined to worry. He's pretty sure it knows what it's trying to do. As long as it doesn't look like it's about to antagonize the entire town yet again, he's willing to follow its lead.

When they catch up to Darkrai, it comes to a halt and rises from the ground. Pikachu perks up, ears lifting. He hears the crowds past the buildings, but no one closer.

Darkrai says nothing intelligible. From somewhere among the mess Pikachu is doing his best to wall himself off from – Darkrai's very unyielding, so it's difficult, like hiding from a hailstorm in an open field – he accidentally picks up the impression that Darkrai is relieved, but... not in a good way? Something like that. He tilts his head, trying to remember if it mentioned murder and destruction quite this frequently before.

It expects them to initiate, he thinks. Ash assumes the same. “What are we stopping for?” he says in honest confusion. Pikachu hiccups in despair. “What is it, buddy?” Ash asks him, and somehow grows more befuddled when Pikachu pats his face gravely.

So they keep moving. Whenever Darkrai pulls ahead, it stops and emerges partway to fix them with a bright blue eye. It doesn't really seem unused to interaction. Everyone says it hasn't befriended anyone after Alice's grandmother, but on his own Pikachu wouldn't have suspected that it's not spent time with anyone in two human lifetimes. It's behaving more civilly than plenty of people and pokémon Pikachu might name. It's much more expressive than Pikachu would have thought, too.

While he's musing, the inevitable happens: Ash's sense of self stutters and wanes, and he trips over air. Microsleep. Pikachu clings tightly to his perch, cries Ash's name, sends sparks through his feet, and briefly hesitates when Ash doesn't immediately snap back to awareness. Then he pushes off for the ground. He lands before Ash, flipping to come down on his back, and his partner's face meets his paws rather than packed dirt.

Pikachu pushes him off and keeps pushing until Ash lies on his side, his bag propping him up from falling fully onto his back. Pikachu rolls to his feet and hurriedly checks Ash's breathing – steady, if slow – then scrambles over him in search of an entry wound. There wouldn't be for a psychic ability, but he wants to eliminate what possibilities he can first.

Ash doesn't feel like someone struck by a psychic attack either, Pikachu thinks as he looks over his partner's arm. He might only be asleep. There's been a trend lately. Pikachu pauses as soon as the idea occurs and focuses on Ash's presence. Faint still, but unmistakable once Pikachu knows what to search for: the prelude to a nightmare.

He shocks Ash again, just to make sure, and winces when Ash's nightmare worsens. Oops.

Darkrai is nowhere to be seen. Pikachu rears, calls for it, and receives no answer. He settles back onto his haunches, bemused. But Darkrai didn't _do_ anything. Why won't Ash wake up?

To make absolutely, positively certain, he hits Ash with a true thunderbolt. No effect. He lifts one of Ash's eyelids, blows into his eyeball, then lets go and scampers over to his belt. He noses the pokéballs, wishing Ash had someone bigger, and in the end, for lack of a better choice, releases the whole team.

Staravia cranes his head about, taking stock of their surroundings; Aipom steals Ash's hat and bares her teeth at Pikachu; Turtwig waddles loud and frantic circles around his prone form. Pikachu calls them to order and gives a rundown of the situation. They need to take Ash to the evacuation point, which should break him out of his nightmares as it's done for the humans and pokémon Darkrai attacked. Just follow the crowds. Everyone's heading for the same place.

Turtwig wants to know what Pikachu intends to do while the rest of them help Ash. Splitting the party rarely ends well. Or adequately. Or without a desperate race to the nearest pokémon center or miracle-granting legendary pokémon. Will Pikachu be alright on his own?

Staravia would not mind the chance to get his claws into Darkrai. He ruffles his wings, looking consideringly at the lifeless sky, and coos.

Aipom jumps onto her tail and improvises an animated performance of the size differences between them and their trainer, somehow without dislodging the cap on her head. She also takes issue with the _should_ part. How sure is he that this will fix Ash, and why is he not more certain? Also, has Pikachu tried zapping him? That usually works.

He explains that this isn't Darkrai's fault, which raises the same issues for the others that it did for him. He can't tell them any more, though, and meanwhile they can all sense Ash's nightmares. They should go. Pikachu will catch up later. He's off to look for Darkrai. Ash wouldn't want to renege on their promise just because one of the team fell into a mysterious coma.

He stays long enough to help them sort out how to carry Ash. Aipom hauls his head over her shoulder, Turtwig bites onto a pant leg and drags, and Staravia carries the backpack in his claws once they maneuver it off of Ash and flies higher to scout for their route. Ash is tough. He'll survive. And a friendly stranger or two will probably get involved before he acquires too many bruises.

Pikachu has a good idea of which direction Darkrai went in. Once the others have started on their wobbly way, Pikachu charges down the road towards the tower.

He doesn't catch up to Darkrai until the plaza at the tower's base, and then he nearly misses it where it's taken up hiding in the shadows beneath a tree near the way in. The only reason he doesn't is because the darker splotch starts to edge away when he comes into view. He hurries over, slowing as Darkrai materializes. There are a few people in the plaza, but the area is large and none of them are close. As long as it doesn't move into the light, Pikachu doesn't think there's a risk of its being spotted.

He sits back and stares up at it. It floats and stares down at him.

It talks, terse as usual. Pikachu tilts his head and scratches an ear.

He's perfectly willing to help it still, alone now or not, but it'll need to show him what it wants.

Maybe it's waiting for Ash to mediate. But it saw Ash fall asleep. Isn't that why it left? They stay at an impasse long enough that Pikachu grows jittery. He drops to all fours, stretches, ambles in a circle, returns. Darkrai might have had enough of staring ineffectually too then, because it leans slightly forwards and slowly raises a hand to its head height, palm down. A moment passes. Pikachu watches curiously as Darkrai waggles two fingers like its hand is a biped walking through the air.

That's Ash's height too, he realizes suddenly, sitting up straighter. Where did Ash go? Is it asking that? Pikachu waves his hands at the people across the plaza leaving. When Darkrai keeps its focus on him, ignoring the direction he's indicating, Pikachu scurries a few feet past it, putting himself between Darkrai and the distant groups, and keeps gesturing – with his paws, by leaping, with verbal sound – until the message gets through. Darkrai's head sinks lower behind its red collar, and it turns slightly away, though Pikachu notices it still watching him out of the corner of its eye.

It doesn't make to move after that. Pikachu waits only a few more seconds before scampering over to the tree. He's not going to figure out what Darkrai wants by sitting about and hoping it'll eventually tell him. Darkrai turns to watch as he arranges the twigs fallen around the roots into letters, snapping the wood for the curves. He makes them as they come to him, not knowing the order humans sort them in. After he lays the final line down for the fourth letter, he glances back at Darkrai, pats the ground between the shapes, and moves aside so it can see them clearly.

Darkrai's eye flits over them. _“No.”_ It brings its hands together.

Pikachu drops immediately into a battle stance, eyes wide. What is it doing now? Aren't they over this? But Darkrai doesn't hear and doesn't answer, and the moment the rings of dark energy twisting between its claws grow to Pikachu's size it spins around and looses the attack at the sky.

Baffled, Pikachu relaxes from his crouch as the beam flies away. It has an impressive range. The rings' color hasn't dimmed when it reaches half the Space-Time Tower's height. When it finally begins to fade, Pikachu can't tell whether it's dying or growing too far away for him to make out. “Ka?” he asks. Darkrai doesn't respond. Pikachu follows its gaze to the attack still rising.

When it reaches the tower's height in the air directly between the twin spires, the dark energy explodes. It's a subdued explosion, the light dim and the sound nonexistent, but dark pulses don't blow up in any capacity. It connected with something else. Pikachu squints up, trying to make out Darkrai's target – he gets as far as identifying the texture, rippling like a heat wave, and then a dissonant howl arrests his attention entirely.

What comes next happens very quickly: a gale emanates in every direction from the point of the explosion, in an instant shearing through the fog shrouding the town, peeling back the cover from a writhing, oily black sky streaked with false lightning; the haze between the towers vanishes, revealing a large, pale object hanging in the sky without visible support; Darkrai charges up another pulse; and then the thing hovering so high up is directly above them with no transition through the space between. Darkrai and Pikachu scatter in opposite directions as a claw blazing with pink light hits the ground where they were – hits it and keeps going without the slightest resistance, stone dissolving into glowing motes beneath the strike.

Pikachu has never met a pokémon who could benefit as much from a trainer as Darkrai. Conflict resolution! It exists! If Darkrai could have just thought to explain itself to the town instead of attacking people, and if it could have just _explained to Pikachu_ that there was an improbably powerful automaton concealed above the tower instead of _attacking it_ , then Darkrai wouldn't be here dodging and morphing into shadow and splitting off illusionary copies and pulling out what might be every trick it has just to evade the thing's claws, unable to find a single opening to go on the offensive.

With a frustrated shout, Pikachu launches a thunderbolt at the thing's back. It roars as the electricity connects and disengages from Darkrai to twist towards Pikachu. Its tail, suddenly sheathed in several feet of water, catches Darkrai off guard as it turns and sends the shadowy pokémon flying back to hit the wall of a building at the edge of the plaza. Though Pikachu's attack caught the thing's attention, it doesn't give any indication of being actually hurt as it moves to stomp on him. Pikachu starts to run out from under the incoming foot, but suddenly the ground rumbles and the cobblestones crack. His paw catches in a crevice, sending him sprawling. The thing's full weight descends.

It's dark and it hurts and he can't think through the awful, crushing pressure squeezing his ribs and skull to creaking. He only reacts.

Lightning surges. Nearly every spark of his stored power screams outwards in a coruscating torrent. He can't name the moment when the thing moves off of him, only knows that when he eventually cuts off the surge he can see the sludgy sky again. He's not sure how long he stays there without moving, ears ringing and every muscle aching and nothing but ozone in his nostrils, sparks flaring and dying in his vision.

The first sensation to filter back in is weightlessness, air under his dangling legs. Then wind pushing through his fur. His back impacts something solid, stunning the breath from him, and he rolls over and over to a stop.

Wheezing, he pushes himself trembling to his feet. He flicks his ears, not to shake off the ringing but to give himself a tangible action to focus on, staring blankly at the the uneven surface of a cobblestone beneath him. Darkrai picked him up and flung him away, didn't it. From somewhere Pikachu musters the energy for disbelief. It generally has good intentions, he's found out. But it doesn't know how to carry them out _at all_.

He looks up, scanning blearily for movement, and watches the white and black blurs across the plaza dance around each other like confuse rays. A flash of light, a crash and a tremor through the earth. Pikachu pushes himself slowly up to sit on his hind legs. Sparks fly from his cheeks as he charges a path between himself and the white shape. Halfway across, his control starts to slip; he looses the lightning strike anyway, and it courses steady for a bare instant before veering off into a bench. Pikachu swallows and presses his cheek. He's nearly dry. He doesn't have enough electricity left to set up a stable channel. Actually, never mind setting up a channel, he doesn't have enough for any sort of control. White-blue sparks skitter aimlessly across his fur, chipping at his already depleted reserves.

He doesn't notice the person drawing near until she's only a feet away. He turns and looks up as she crouches. She rings some bells. “Aren't you Ash's pikachu?” she asks, and he flicks an ear as he recognizes her by her voice. Alice puts out a hand, holds still until his eyes focus on it, and reaches for his head.

Her palm settles behind his ears, and then she snaps back with a startled sound. Pikachu recoils from her pain on reflex. Tonio, who Pikachu only now registers standing behind her, hurries to put a hand on her shoulder. “Alice?”

“Static. It's fine.”

Tonio hesitates. “Alice, we need – ”

A dragon pulse tears by half a dozen feet to Pikachu's left. Air flees gracelessly from its path. Pikachu narrows his eyes against the wind, bristling at the energy. It fizzles away a few long seconds later. Alice and Tonio are both very quiet. Then Tonio says, breathing heavily, “Alice, we need to hurry.”

“Give me your jacket,” Alice says. Tonio does without hesitation, handing over his laptop for her to hold as he takes it off, and then Alice wraps it around Pikachu. He squirms a bit to keep the cloth under his neck. Once he's situated, Alice picks him up, hugging him to her chest and tensing at every spark that makes it through the cloth. Pikachu only notices distantly through the encroaching fade. He stays awake long enough to feel Alice running and see the tower's base growing larger, and to hear her to say, “You're alright, Pikachu, you can sleep. We'll bring you back to Ash after we stop this.”


End file.
